Conserved and novel enhancers in the Aedes aegypti single-minded locus recapitulate embryonic ventral midline gene expression.
PLoS Genet
; 20(4): e1010891, 2024 Apr.
Article
em En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-38683842
ABSTRACT
Transcriptional cis-regulatory modules, e.g., enhancers, control the time and location of metazoan gene expression. While changes in enhancers can provide a powerful force for evolution, there is also significant deep conservation of enhancers for developmentally important genes, with function and sequence characteristics maintained over hundreds of millions of years of divergence. Not well understood, however, is how the overall regulatory composition of a locus evolves, with important outstanding questions such as how many enhancers are conserved vs. novel, and to what extent are the locations of conserved enhancers within a locus maintained? We begin here to address these questions with a comparison of the respective single-minded (sim) loci in the two dipteran species Drosophila melanogaster (fruit fly) and Aedes aegypti (mosquito). sim encodes a highly conserved transcription factor that mediates development of the arthropod embryonic ventral midline. We identify two enhancers in the A. aegypti sim locus and demonstrate that they function equivalently in both transgenic flies and transgenic mosquitoes. One A. aegypti enhancer is highly similar to known Drosophila counterparts in its activity, location, and autoregulatory capability. The other differs from any known Drosophila sim enhancers with a novel location, failure to autoregulate, and regulation of expression in a unique subset of midline cells. Our results suggest that the conserved pattern of sim expression in the two species is the result of both conserved and novel regulatory sequences. Further examination of this locus will help to illuminate how the overall regulatory landscape of a conserved developmental gene evolves.
Texto completo:
1
Coleções:
01-internacional
Base de dados:
MEDLINE
Assunto principal:
Elementos Facilitadores Genéticos
/
Regulação da Expressão Gênica no Desenvolvimento
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Aedes
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Drosophila melanogaster
Limite:
Animals
Idioma:
En
Revista:
PLoS Genet
Assunto da revista:
GENETICA
Ano de publicação:
2024
Tipo de documento:
Article
País de afiliação:
Estados Unidos