Tuyển tập các báo cáo nghiên cứu về sinh học được đăng trên tạp chí sinh học Journal of Biology đề tài: Conserved elements within open reading frames of mammalian Hox genes. | Journal of Biology BioMed Central Minireview Conserved elements within open reading frames of mammalian Hox genes Joost M Woltering and Denis Duboule 1 Addresses National Research Centre Frontiers in Genetics Department of Zoology and Animal Biology University of Geneva Sciences III Quai Ernest-Ansermet 30 1211 Geneva 4 Switzerland. tNational Research Centre Frontiers in Genetics School of Life Sciences Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale 1015 Lausanne Switzerland. Correspondence Denis Duboule. Email Published 6 February 2009 Journal of Biology 2009 8 17 doi jbiolll6 The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at http content 8 2 17 2009 BioMed Central Ltd Abstract A recent study in BMC Evolutionary Biology shows that many of the open reading frames in mammalian Hox genes are more conserved than expected on the basis of their protein sequence. The presence of highly conserved DNA elements is thus not confined to the noncoding DNA in neighboring regions but clearly overlaps with coding sequences. These findings support an emerging view that gene regulatory and coding sequences are likely to be more intermingled than once believed. More conserved than conserved Comparisons between vertebrate genomes reveal a range of highly conserved sequences located within noncoding regions 1 2 . These conserved elements are typically 50 to 300 nucleotides long and were initially identified by alignments of orthologous loci. More recently whole-genome sequence comparisons have provided rather exhaustive accounts of such elements which were identified using criteria of various stringencies and expectedly are referred to by different terminologies 1-4 . For example the best-conserved class of elements named ultraconserved elements contains sequences 200 bp long at least and identical among human mouse and rat 3 . Another study describes ultraconserved regions that is sequences showing both a minimum of 95 .
