Gene Regulation and Evolution

Kevin White (aka, Mr. Drosophila microarray data) has a paper coming out in tomorrow's issue of Nature. The paper (which is not available on the Nature website yet) compares the expression of over 1,000 genes from humans, chimpanzees, orangutans and rhesus monkeys. From a news write up of the findings:

When they also looked for human genes with significantly higher or lower expression levels, they found 14 genes with increased expression and five with decreased expression. While only ten percent of the genes in the total array were transcription factors, 42 percent of those with increased expression in humans were. None of those with lower expression were transcription factors. This pattern, the authors note, is consistent with "directional selection."

From what I can gather, the authors argue that selection on transcription factors has played a disproportionate role in phenotypic evolution along the hominid lineage. I've written before on what I think about quantifying non-sequence level divergence, and I haven't read the actual article, so I'll refrain from commenting much. One thing I will point out is that it appears that the authors are implicating trans factors as more important that cis elements, and cis changes have been shown to be extremely important in expression divergence in Drosophila.

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