MBE Advance Access published online on December 20, 2006
Molecular Biology and Evolution, doi:10.1093/molbev/msl205
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Research Article |
Comparison of Pax1/9 Locus Reveals 500-Million-Year-Old Syntenic Block and Evolutionary Conserved Non-Coding Regions

* Key Laboratory of the Ministry of Education for Cell Biology and Tumor Cell Engineering, School of Life Sciences, Xiamen University, Xiamen, 362005, China
Key Laboratory of Cellular and Molecular Evolution, Kunming Institute of Zoology and Kunming Primate Research Center, The Chinese Academy of Sciences, Kunming, 650223, China
¶ Chinese Human Genome Center at Shanghai, Shanghai, 201203, China
Corresponding author: Yi-Quan Wang; Address: School of Life Sciences, Xiamen University, Xiamen, 362005, China; Tel: +86-592-2184427; Fax: +86-592-2181015; E-mail: wangyq{at}xmu.edu.cn
Accepted for publication December 18, 2006.
Identification of conserved genomic regions within and between different genomes is crucial when studying genome evolution. Here, we described regions of strong synteny conservation between vertebrates (tetraopods and teleosts) and invertebrate deuterostomes (amphioxus and sea urchin). The shared gene contents across phylogenetically distant species demonstrate that the conservation of the regions stemmed from an ancestral segment instead of a series of independent convergent events. Comparison of the syntenic regions allows us to postulate the primitive gene organization in the last common ancestor of deuterostomes and the evolutionary events that occurred to the three distinct lineages of sea urchin, amphioxus and vertebrates after their separation. In addition, alignment of the syntenic regions led to the identification of 8 non-coding evolutionary conserved regions shared between amphioxus and vertebrates. To our knowledge, this is the first report of conserved non-coding sequences shared by vertebrates and non-vertebrates. These non-coding sequences have high possibility of being elements that regulate neighboring genes. They are likely to be a factor in the maintenance of conserved synteny over long phylogenetic distance in different deuterostome lineages.
Key Words: amphioxus conserved synteny ncECR duplication evolution