TBI-Preprint 03-002

Titel:
Surveying Phylogenetic Footprints in Large Gene Clusters:
Applications to Hox Cluster Duplications

Author(s):
Sonja Prohaska, Claudia Fried, Christoph Flamm, Günter P. Wagner and Peter F. Stadler

submitted to:
J.Mol.Biol, (2003)

Abstract:
Evolutionarily conserved non-coding genomic sequences represent a potentially rich source for the discovery of gene regulatory regions. Since these elements are subject to stabilizing selection they evolve much slower than adjacent non-functional DNA. These so-called phylogenetic footprints can be detected by comparison of the sequences surrounding orthologous genes in different species. In this paper we present a new method and an efficient software tool for the identification of corresponding footprints in long sequences from multiple species. This allows the evolutionary study of the origin and loss of phylogenetic footprints if sufficient number and appropriately placed species are included. We apply this method to the published sequences of HoxA clusters of shark, human, and the duplicated zebrafish and Takifugu clusters as well as the published HoxB cluster sequences. We find that there is a massive loss of sequence conservation in the intergenic region of the HoxA clusters, consistent with the finding in [Chiu et al., PNAS 99, 5492-5497 (2002)]. We further propose a simple model to estimate the loss of sequence conservation that can be attributed to gene loss and other structural reasons. We find that the loss of conservation after cluster duplication is more extensive than expected by this model. This suggests that binding site turnover and/or adaptive modification may also contribute to the loss of sequence conservation. We conclude that this method is suitable for the large scale study of the evolution of (putative) cis-regulatory elements.

Keywords: Phylogenetic footprints, Hox gene clusters, gene duplication

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