|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||
| Home Help Feedback Subscriptions Archive Search Table of Contents | ||||
First published online 27 August 2003
doi: 10.1242/dev.00711
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Department of Molecular Biology, Massachusetts General Hospital and Department of Genetics, Harvard Medical School, Wellman 8, Boston, MA 02114, USA
* Author for correspondence (e-mail: ruvkun{at}molbio.mgh.harvard.edu)
Accepted 17 July 2003
Expression patterns of orthologous genes are often conserved, even between distantly related organisms, suggesting that once established, developmental programs can be stably maintained over long periods of evolutionary time. Because many orthologous transcription factors are also functionally conserved, one possible model to account for homologous gene expression patterns, is conservation of specific binding sites within cis-regulatory elements of orthologous genes. If this model is correct, a cis-regulatory element from one organism would be expected to function in a distantly related organism. To test this hypothesis, we fused the green fluorescent protein gene to neuronal and muscular enhancer elements from a variety of Drosophila melanogaster genes, and tested whether these would activate expression in the homologous cell types in Caenorhabditis elegans. Regulatory elements from several genes directed appropriate expression in homologous tissue types, suggesting conservation of regulatory sites. However, enhancers of most Drosophila genes tested were not properly recognized in C. elegans, implying that over this evolutionary distance enough changes occurred in cis-regulatory sequences and/or transcription factors to prevent proper recognition of heterospecific enhancers. Comparisons of enhancer elements of orthologous genes between C. elegans and C. briggsae revealed extensive conservation, as well as specific instances of functional divergence. Our results indicate that functional changes in cis-regulatory sequences accumulate on timescales much shorter than the divergence of arthropods and nematodes, and that mechanisms other than conservation of individual binding sites within enhancer elements are responsible for the conservation of expression patterns of homologous genes between distantly related species.
Key words: Evolution, Enhancer, C. elegans, C. briggsae, D. melanogaster, Co-evolution
CiteULike 
Complore 
Connotea 
Del.icio.us 
Digg 
Reddit 
Technorati 
Twitter What's this?
Related articles in Development:
This article has been cited by other articles:
|
|
 |
|
  S. G. Kuntz, E. M. Schwarz, J. A. DeModena, T. De Buysscher, D. Trout, H. Shizuya, P. W. Sternberg, and B. J. Wold Multigenome DNA sequence conservation identifies Hox cis-regulatory elements Genome Res., December 1, 2008; 18(12): 1955 - 1968. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
|
|
|
|
 |
|
 R. R Copley The animal in the genome: comparative genomics and evolution Phil Trans R Soc B, April 27, 2008; 363(1496): 1453 - 1461. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
|
|
|
|
 |
|
 A. G. Jegga, A. Inga, D. Menendez, B. J. Aronow, and M. A. Resnick Functional evolution of the p53 regulatory network through its target response elements PNAS, January 22, 2008; 105(3): 944 - 949. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
|
|
|
|
|
|
M. Lynch Colloquium Papers: The frailty of adaptive hypotheses for the origins of organismal complexity PNAS, May 15, 2007; 104(suppl_1): 8597 - 8604. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
|
|
|
|
|
|
A. J.M. Walhout Unraveling transcription regulatory networks by protein-DNA and protein-protein interaction mapping Genome Res., December 1, 2006; 16(12): 1445 - 1454. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
|
|
|
|
 |
|
 G. A. Wray The evolution of embryonic gene expression in sea urchins Integr. Comp. Biol., June 1, 2006; 46(3): 233 - 242. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
|
|
|
|
 |
|
 J. Blanco, F. Girard, Y. Kamachi, H. Kondoh, and W. J. Gehring Functional analysis of the chicken {delta}1-crystallin enhancer activity in Drosophila reveals remarkable evolutionary conservation between chicken and fly Development, April 15, 2005; 132(8): 1895 - 1905. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
|
|
|
|
|
|
E. Efimenko, K. Bubb, H. Y. Mak, T. Holzman, M. R. Leroux, G. Ruvkun, J. H. Thomas, and P. Swoboda Analysis of xbx genes in C. elegans Development, April 15, 2005; 132(8): 1923 - 1934. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
|
|
|
|
|
|
I. Oda-Ishii, V. Bertrand, I. Matsuo, P. Lemaire, and H. Saiga Making very similar embryos with divergent genomes: conservation of regulatory mechanisms of Otx between the ascidians Halocynthia roretzi and Ciona intestinalis Development, April 1, 2005; 132(7): 1663 - 1674. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
|
|
|
|
 |
|
 M. L. Givens, R. Kurotani, N. Rave-Harel, N. L. G. Miller, and P. L. Mellon Phylogenetic Footprinting Reveals Evolutionarily Conserved Regions of the Gonadotropin-Releasing Hormone Gene that Enhance Cell-Specific Expression Mol. Endocrinol., December 1, 2004; 18(12): 2950 - 2966. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
|
|
|
|
|
|
S. M. Brugger, A. E. Merrill, J. Torres-Vazquez, N. Wu, M.-C. Ting, J. Y.-M. Cho, S. L. Dobias, S. E. Yi, K. Lyons, J. R. Bell, et al. A phylogenetically conserved cis-regulatory module in the Msx2 promoter is sufficient for BMP-dependent transcription in murine and Drosophila embryos Development, October 15, 2004; 131(20): 5153 - 5165. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
|
|
