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Evolution of lineage-specific functions in ancient cis-regulatory modules.

ABSTRACT: Morphological evolution is driven both by coding sequence variation and by changes in regulatory sequences. However, how cis-regulatory modules (CRMs) evolve to generate entirely novel expression domains is largely unknown. Here, we reconstruct the evolutionary history of a lens enhancer located within a CRM that not only predates the lens, a vertebrate innovation, but bilaterian animals in general. Alignments of orthologous sequences from different deuterostomes sub-divide the CRM into a deeply conserved core and a more divergent flanking region. We demonstrate that all deuterostome flanking regions, including invertebrate sequences, activate gene expression in the zebrafish lens through the same ancient cluster of activator sites. However, levels of gene expression vary between species due to the presence of repressor motifs in flanking region and core. These repressor motifs are responsible for the relatively weak enhancer activity of tetrapod flanking regions. Ray-finned fish, however, have gained two additional lineage-specific activator motifs which in combination with the ancient cluster of activators and the core constitute a potent lens enhancer. The exploitation and modification of existing regulatory potential in flanking regions but not in the highly conserved core might represent a more general model for the emergence of novel regulatory functions in complex CRMs.

SUBMITTER: Pauls S

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4680567 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Evolution of lineage-specific functions in ancient cis-regulatory modules.

Pauls Stefan S Goode Debbie K DK Petrone Libero L Oliveri Paola P Elgar Greg G

Open biology 20151101 11

Morphological evolution is driven both by coding sequence variation and by changes in regulatory sequences. However, how cis-regulatory modules (CRMs) evolve to generate entirely novel expression domains is largely unknown. Here, we reconstruct the evolutionary history of a lens enhancer located within a CRM that not only predates the lens, a vertebrate innovation, but bilaterian animals in general. Alignments of orthologous sequences from different deuterostomes sub-divide the CRM into a deeply ...[more]

PMID: 26538567

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Project description:Cross-species comparison has emerged as a powerful paradigm for predicting cis-regulatory modules (CRMs) and understanding their evolution. The comparison requires reliable sequence alignment, which remains a challenging task for less conserved noncoding sequences. Furthermore, the existing models of DNA sequence evolution generally do not explicitly treat the special properties of CRM sequences. To address these limitations, we propose a model of CRM evolution that captures different modes of evolution of functional transcription factor binding sites (TFBSs) and the background sequences. A particularly novel aspect of our work is a probabilistic model of gains and losses of TFBSs, a process being recognized as an important part of regulatory sequence evolution. We present a computational framework that uses this model to solve the problems of CRM alignment and prediction. Our alignment method is similar to existing methods of statistical alignment but uses the conserved binding sites to improve alignment. Our CRM prediction method deals with the inherent uncertainties of binding site annotations and sequence alignment in a probabilistic framework. In simulated as well as real data, we demonstrate that our program is able to improve both alignment and prediction of CRM sequences over several state-of-the-art methods. Finally, we used alignments produced by our program to study binding site conservation in genome-wide binding data of key transcription factors in the Drosophila blastoderm, with two intriguing results: (i) the factor-bound sequences are under strong evolutionary constraints even if their neighboring genes are not expressed in the blastoderm and (ii) binding sites in distal bound sequences (relative to transcription start sites) tend to be more conserved than those in proximal regions. Our approach is implemented as software, EMMA (Evolutionary Model-based cis-regulatory Module Analysis), ready to be applied in a broad biological context.

Dataset Information

Evolution of lineage-specific functions in ancient cis-regulatory modules.

Publications

Evolution of lineage-specific functions in ancient cis-regulatory modules.

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