Transcriptional autoregulatory loops are highly conserved in vertebrate evolution.
BACKGROUND
Feedback loops are the simplest building blocks of transcriptional regulatory networks and therefore their behavior in the course of evolution is of prime interest.


METHODS
We address the question of enrichment of the number of autoregulatory feedback loops in higher organisms. First, based on predicted autoregulatory binding sites we count the number of autoregulatory loops. We compare it to estimates obtained either by assuming that each (conserved) gene has the same chance to be a target of a given factor or by assuming that each conserved sequence position has an equal chance to be a binding site of the factor.


CONCLUSIONS
We demonstrate that the numbers of putative autoregulatory loops conserved between human and fugu, danio or chicken are significantly higher than expected. Moreover we show, that conserved autoregulatory binding sites cluster close to the factors' starts of transcription. We conclude, that transcriptional autoregulatory feedback loops constitute a core transcriptional network motif and their conservation has been maintained in higher vertebrate organism evolution.
Kiełbasa
Szymon M
SM
Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics, Berlin, Germany. szymon.kielbasa@molgen.mpg.de
Vingron
Martin
M
D000818:Animals; D001665:Binding Sites; D002645:Chickens; D017124:Conserved Sequence; D030541:Databases, Genetic; D019143:Evolution, Molecular; D005786:Gene Expression Regulation; D006801:Humans; D015233:Models, Statistical; D008969:Molecular Sequence Data; D011336:Probability; D023741:Takifugu; D014157:Transcription Factors / Q000378:metabolism; D014158:Transcription, Genetic; D014714:Vertebrates / Q000235:genetics*; D015027:Zebrafish
D014157:Transcription Factors
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