Topologically associating domains are ancient features that coincide with Metazoan clusters of extreme noncoding conservation

Nathan Harmston (), Elizabeth Ing-Simmons, Ge Tan, Malcolm Perry, Matthias Merkenschlager and Boris Lenhard ()
Additional contact information
Nathan Harmston: MRC London Institute of Medical Sciences
Elizabeth Ing-Simmons: MRC London Institute of Medical Sciences
Ge Tan: MRC London Institute of Medical Sciences
Malcolm Perry: MRC London Institute of Medical Sciences
Matthias Merkenschlager: Imperial College London
Boris Lenhard: MRC London Institute of Medical Sciences

Nature Communications, 2017, vol. 8, issue 1, 1-13

Abstract: Abstract Developmental genes in metazoan genomes are surrounded by dense clusters of conserved noncoding elements (CNEs). CNEs exhibit unexplained extreme levels of sequence conservation, with many acting as developmental long-range enhancers. Clusters of CNEs define the span of regulatory inputs for many important developmental regulators and have been described previously as genomic regulatory blocks (GRBs). Their function and distribution around important regulatory genes raises the question of how they relate to 3D conformation of these loci. Here, we show that clusters of CNEs strongly coincide with topological organisation, predicting the boundaries of hundreds of topologically associating domains (TADs) in human and Drosophila. The set of TADs that are associated with high levels of noncoding conservation exhibit distinct properties compared to TADs devoid of extreme noncoding conservation. The close correspondence between extreme noncoding conservation and TADs suggests that these TADs are ancient, revealing a regulatory architecture conserved over hundreds of millions of years.

Date: 2017
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-00524-5 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:8:y:2017:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-017-00524-5

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-017-00524-5

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().