TY - JOUR TI - Conservation of transcription factor binding specificities across 600 million years of bilateria evolution AU - Nitta, Kazuhiro R AU - Jolma, Arttu AU - Yin, Yimeng AU - Morgunova, Ekaterina AU - Kivioja, Teemu AU - Akhtar, Junaid AU - Hens, Korneel AU - Toivonen, Jarkko AU - Deplancke, Bart AU - Furlong, Eileen E M AU - Taipale, Jussi A2 - Ren, Bing VL - 4 PY - 2015 DA - 2015/03/17 SP - e04837 C1 - eLife 2015;4:e04837 DO - 10.7554/eLife.04837 UR - https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.04837 AB - Divergent morphology of species has largely been ascribed to genetic differences in the tissue-specific expression of proteins, which could be achieved by divergence in cis-regulatory elements or by altering the binding specificity of transcription factors (TFs). The relative importance of the latter has been difficult to assess, as previous systematic analyses of TF binding specificity have been performed using different methods in different species. To address this, we determined the binding specificities of 242 Drosophila TFs, and compared them to human and mouse data. This analysis revealed that TF binding specificities are highly conserved between Drosophila and mammals, and that for orthologous TFs, the similarity extends even to the level of very subtle dinucleotide binding preferences. The few human TFs with divergent specificities function in cell types not found in fruit flies, suggesting that evolution of TF specificities contributes to emergence of novel types of differentiated cells. KW - transcription factor KW - evolutionary conservation KW - DNA binding specificity KW - HT-SELEX JF - eLife SN - 2050-084X PB - eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd ER -