title: Sequence comparison of human and mouse genes reveals a homologous block structure in the promoter regions.
abstract: Comparative sequence analysis was carried out for the regions adjacent to experimentally validated transcriptional start sites (TSSs), using 3324 pairs of human and mouse genes. We aligned the upstream putative promoter sequences over the 1-kb proximal regions and found that the sequence conservation could not be further extended at, on average, 510 bp upstream positions of the TSSs. This discontinuous manner of the sequence conservation revealed a "block" structure in about one-third of the putative promoter regions. Consistently, we also observed that G+C content and CpG frequency were significantly different inside and outside the blocks. Within the blocks, the sequence identity was uniformly 65% regardless of their length. About 90% of the previously characterized transcription factor binding sites were located within those blocks. In 46% of the blocks, the 5' ends were bounded by interspersed repetitive elements, some of which may have nucleated the genomic rearrangements. The length of the blocks was shortest in the promoters of genes encoding transcription factors and of genes whose expression patterns are brain specific, which suggests that the evolutional diversifications in the transcriptional modulations should be the most marked in these populations of genes.
authors.affiliation: Human Genome Center, The Institute of Medical Science, The University of Tokyo, Minato-ku, Tokyo, 108-8639, Japan. ysuzuki@ims.u-tokyo.ac.jp
authors.forename: Yutaka
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Suzuki
authors.forename: Riu
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Yamashita
authors.forename: Matsuyuki
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Shirota
authors.forename: Yuta
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Sakakibara
authors.forename: Joe
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Chiba
authors.forename: Junko
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Mizushima-Sugano
authors.forename: Kenta
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Nakai
authors.forename: Sumio
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Sugano
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001665:Binding Sites; D005075:Biological Evolution; D001921:Brain / Q000378:metabolism*; D017124:Conserved Sequence; D005796:Genes; D006801:Humans; D051379:Mice; D008969:Molecular Sequence Data; D011401:Promoter Regions, Genetic; D012091:Repetitive Sequences, Nucleic Acid; D014018:Tissue Distribution; D014157:Transcription Factors / Q000378:metabolism*; D014158:Transcription, Genetic
chemical_list: D014157:Transcription Factors