Magali Naville, Minaka Ishibashi, Marco Ferg, Hemant Bengani, Silke Rinkwitz, Monika Krecsmarik, Thomas A Hawkins, Stephen W Wilson, Elizabeth Manning, Chandra S R Chilamakuri, David I Wilson, Alexandra Louis, F Lucy Raymond, Sepand Rastegar, Uwe Strähle, Boris Lenhard, Laure Bally-Cuif, Veronica van Heyningen, David R FitzPatrick, Thomas S Becker, Hugues Roest Crollius
Enhancers can regulate the transcription of genes over long genomic distances. This is thought to lead to selection against genomic rearrangements within such regions that may disrupt this functional linkage. Here we test this concept experimentally using the human X chromosome. We describe a scoring method to identify evolutionary maintenance of linkage between conserved noncoding elements and neighbouring genes. Chromatin marks associated with enhancer function are strongly correlated with this linkage score...
April 24, 2015: Nature Communications