A deep-time landscape of plant cis-regulatory sequence evolution - PubMed
a day ago
- #plant evolution
- #developmental genetics
- #cis-regulatory sequences
- Developmental gene function is conserved over deep time, but cis-regulatory sequence conservation is hard to identify.
- Challenges include rapid sequence turnover, paleopolyploidy, structural variation, and limited phylogenomic sampling.
- Conservatory algorithm uses microsynteny and iterative alignments to map CNS-gene associations across 284 plant species.
- Discovered ~2.3 million CNSs, including over 3,000 predating angiosperms, spanning 300 million years.
- Ancient CNSs are enriched near developmental regulators; mutations near HOMEOBOX genes caused strong phenotypes.
- Key principles: CNS spacing varies but order is conserved; genomic rearrangements form new CNS-gene associations.
- Ancient CNSs are preferentially retained among paralogs but often lost as cohorts or evolve into lineage-specific CNSs.