Transcription Factor Binding Not So Evolutionarily Conserved
Researchers writing in Science have discovered a remarkable amount of plasticity in how transcription factors, the proteins that bind to DNA to control the activation of genes, maintained their function over 300 million years of evolution. They say that sequence conservation is not the whole story when it comes to maintaining tissue-specific gene regulation. Scientists believe that transcription factors recognize the genes that they regulate by binding to short, sequence-specific lengths of DNA upstream or downstream of their target genes. It was widely assumed that, like the sequences of the genes themselves, these transcription factor binding sites would be highly conserved throughout evolution. However, this turns out not to be the case in mammals. read more