Evidence for a common evolutionary rate in metazoan transcriptional networks

Anne Ruxandra Carvunis, Tina Wang, Dylan Skola, Alice Yu, Jonathan Chen, Jason F. Kreisberg, Trey Ideker*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal Article peer-review

21 Scopus citations

Abstract

Genome sequences diverge more rapidly in mammals than in other animal lineages, such as birds or insects. However, the effect of this rapid divergence on transcriptional evolution remains unclear. Recent reports have indicated a faster divergence of transcription factor binding in mammals than in insects, but others found the reverse for mRNA expression. Here, we show that these conflicting interpretations resulted from differing methodologies. We performed an integrated analysis of transcriptional network evolution by examining mRNA expression, transcription factor binding and cis-regulatory motifs across >25 animal species, including mammals, birds and insects. Strikingly, we found that transcriptional networks evolve at a common rate across the three animal lineages. Furthermore, differences in rates of genome divergence were greatly reduced when restricting comparisons to chromatin-accessible sequences. The evolution of transcription is thus decoupled from the global rate of genome sequence evolution, suggesting that a small fraction of the genome regulates transcription.

Original languageEnglish
Article numbere11615
JournaleLife
Volume4
Issue numberDECEMBER2015
DOIs
StatePublished - 18 12 2015
Externally publishedYes

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© Carvunis et al.

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