Tuyển tập các báo cáo nghiên cứu về sinh học được đăng trên tạp chí sinh học Journal of Biology đề tài: Gene regulation, evolvability and the limits of genomics. | Journal of Biology Editorial Gene regulation evolvability and the limits of genomics Miranda Robertson Of the fundamental issues in biology that remain unresolved one of the most prominent is that of the evolution of gene expression. Unlike proteins in which conservation of function is largely reflected in conservation of primary sequence conservation of function in the regulatory regions of genes seems to be maintained in the face of quite widely divergent primary sequence. Since the diversification of species depends much more on divergent gene expression than on divergent gene sequence we famously share 95 of our genomic sequence with chimpanzees the relationship of promoter structure to promoter function and the evolution of gene expression are a focus of considerable topical interest. Earlier this year we published a paper from Chan et al. 1 examining the relationship between conservation of gene expression and conservation of regulatory sequence in twenty tissues from three vertebrate species. They reported almost no conservation of associated noncoding sequence for genes with highly conserved expression patterns - a result that is consistent with accumulating evidence from other studies discussed in the associated commentary from John Malone and Brian Oliver 2 . In this issue Tirosh et al. 3 review recent studies in yeast aimed at identifying those properties of promoters that might account for the evolutionary divergence and the evolvability of gene expression and focusing not on the primary sequence of regulatory regions but on their more general architectural properties and the relative contribution of regulatory DNA and the proteins that are required for its regulation. The number of binding sites for regulatory proteins is larger in promoters of genes with divergent expression patterns which does not seem hard to understand and there are more bound nucleosomes which is not so easy to understand Tirosh et al. suggest more scope for regulation and .
