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Gene body methylation is conserved between plant orthologs and is of evolutionary consequence.

ABSTRACT: DNA methylation is a common feature of eukaryotic genomes and is especially common in noncoding regions of plants. Protein coding regions of plants are often methylated also, but the extent, function, and evolutionary consequences of gene body methylation remain unclear. Here we investigate gene body methylation using an explicit comparative evolutionary approach. We generated bisulfite sequencing data from two tissues of Brachypodium distachyon and compared genic methylation patterns to those of rice (Oryza sativa ssp. japonica). Gene body methylation was strongly conserved between orthologs of the two species and affected a biased subset of long, slowly evolving genes. Because gene body methylation is conserved over evolutionary time, it shapes important features of plant genome evolution, such as the bimodality of G+C content among grass genes. Our results superficially contradict previous observations of high cytosine methylation polymorphism within Arabidopsis thaliana genes, but reanalyses of these data are consistent with conservation of methylation within gene regions. Overall, our results indicate that the methylation level is a long-term property of individual genes and therefore of evolutionary consequence.

SUBMITTER: Takuno S

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3562806 | biostudies-literature | 2013 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Gene body methylation is conserved between plant orthologs and is of evolutionary consequence.

Takuno Shohei S Gaut Brandon S BS

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 20130114 5

DNA methylation is a common feature of eukaryotic genomes and is especially common in noncoding regions of plants. Protein coding regions of plants are often methylated also, but the extent, function, and evolutionary consequences of gene body methylation remain unclear. Here we investigate gene body methylation using an explicit comparative evolutionary approach. We generated bisulfite sequencing data from two tissues of Brachypodium distachyon and compared genic methylation patterns to those o ...[more]

PMID: 23319627

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Project description:BACKGROUND: Characterization of robustness and plasticity of phenotypes is a basic issue in evolutionary and developmental biology. The robustness and plasticity are concerned with changeability of a biological system against external perturbations. The perturbations are either genetic, i.e., due to mutations in genes in the population, or epigenetic, i.e., due to noise during development or environmental variations. Thus, the variances of phenotypes due to genetic and epigenetic perturbations provide quantitative measures for such changeability during evolution and development, respectively. RESULTS: Using numerical models simulating the evolutionary changes in the gene regulation network required to achieve a particular expression pattern, we first confirmed that gene expression dynamics robust to mutation evolved in the presence of a sufficient level of transcriptional noise. Under such conditions, the two types of variances in the gene expression levels, i.e. those due to mutations to the gene regulation network and those due to noise in gene expression dynamics were found to be proportional over a number of genes. The fraction of such genes with a common proportionality coefficient increased with an increase in the robustness of the evolved network. This proportionality was generally confirmed, also under the presence of environmental fluctuations and sexual recombination in diploids, and was explained from an evolutionary robustness hypothesis, in which an evolved robust system suppresses the so-called error catastrophe--the destabilization of the single-peaked distribution in gene expression levels. Experimental evidences for the proportionality of the variances over genes are also discussed. CONCLUSIONS: The proportionality between the genetic and epigenetic variances of phenotypes implies the correlation between the robustness (or plasticity) against genetic changes and against noise in development, and also suggests that phenotypic traits that are more variable epigenetically have a higher evolutionary potential.

Dataset Information

Gene body methylation is conserved between plant orthologs and is of evolutionary consequence.

Publications

Gene body methylation is conserved between plant orthologs and is of evolutionary consequence.

Similar Datasets

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