Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Acemel, Rafael D
• Tena, Juan J
• Irastorza-Azcarate, Ibai
• Marlétaz, Ferdinand
• Gómez-Marín, Carlos
• de la Calle-Mustienes, Elisa
• Bertrand, Stéphanie
• Diaz, Sergio G
• Aldea, Daniel
• Aury, Jean-Marc
• Mangenot, Sophie
• Holland, Peter W H
• Devos, Damien P
• Maeso, Ignacio
• Escrivá, Hector
• Gómez-Skarmeta, José Luis

Titel

A single three-dimensional chromatin compartment in amphioxus indicates a stepwise evolution of vertebrate Hox bimodal regulation

Ist Teil von

• Nature genetics, 2016-03, Vol.48 (3), p.336-341

Ort / Verlag

United States: Nature Publishing Group

Erscheinungsjahr

2016

Quelle

MEDLINE

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• The HoxA and HoxD gene clusters of jawed vertebrates are organized into bipartite three-dimensional chromatin structures that separate long-range regulatory inputs coming from the anterior and posterior Hox-neighboring regions. This architecture is instrumental in allowing vertebrate Hox genes to pattern disparate parts of the body, including limbs. Almost nothing is known about how these three-dimensional topologies originated. Here we perform extensive 4C-seq profiling of the Hox cluster in embryos of amphioxus, an invertebrate chordate. We find that, in contrast to the architecture in vertebrates, the amphioxus Hox cluster is organized into a single chromatin interaction domain that includes long-range contacts mostly from the anterior side, bringing distant cis-regulatory elements into contact with Hox genes. We infer that the vertebrate Hox bipartite regulatory system is an evolutionary novelty generated by combining ancient long-range regulatory contacts from DNA in the anterior Hox neighborhood with new regulatory inputs from the posterior side.