Plant & Animal Genomes XVII Conference

January 10-14, 2009
Town & Country Convention Center
San Diego, CA

Discovery Of Conserved Functional Elements Using Evolutionary Conservation In Plants

Xi Wang , Georg Haberer , Klaus FX Mayer

  (1) MIPS/IBIS, Helmholtz Center Munich, Ingolstädter Landstr. 1, 85764 Neuherberg, Germany

Spatiotemporal regulation of gene expression is regulated by presence and absence of cis-regulatory sites in its promoter. Both in the economically highly important grass family as well as for model genomes such as Arabidopsis thaliana, our knowledge of transcription factor binding sites and transcriptional networks is still very limited. With the completion of genomes of suitable evolutionary distance to allow phylogenetic comparisons, i.e. sorghum and rice, A. thaliana and A. lyrata, comparative promoter studies now allow genome-scale detection of conserved cis-elements. Via a combination of co-expression analysis from different expression data sets and phylogenetic conservation we identified thousands of phylogenetic footprints conserved between orthologous promoter pairs. In a complementary approach, cis-motifs were discovered by their high global conservation rate in syntenic promoter pairs. Expression similarities of gene pairs positively correlate with the number of motifs that is shared by gene pairs. Sequence conservation and matches to known plant motifs support our findings.