TY - JOUR TI - Fast turnover of genome transcription across evolutionary time exposes entire non-coding DNA to de novo gene emergence AU - Neme, Rafik AU - Tautz, Diethard A2 - Gingeras, Thomas R VL - 5 PY - 2016 DA - 2016/02/02 SP - e09977 C1 - eLife 2016;5:e09977 DO - 10.7554/eLife.09977 UR - https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.09977 AB - Deep sequencing analyses have shown that a large fraction of genomes is transcribed, but the significance of this transcription is much debated. Here, we characterize the phylogenetic turnover of poly-adenylated transcripts in a comprehensive sampling of taxa of the mouse (genus Mus), spanning a phylogenetic distance of 10 Myr. Using deep RNA sequencing we find that at a given sequencing depth transcriptome coverage becomes saturated within a taxon, but keeps extending when compared between taxa, even at this very shallow phylogenetic level. Our data show a high turnover of transcriptional states between taxa and that no major transcript-free islands exist across evolutionary time. This suggests that the entire genome can be transcribed into poly-adenylated RNA when viewed at an evolutionary time scale. We conclude that any part of the non-coding genome can potentially become subject to evolutionary functionalization via de novo gene evolution within relatively short evolutionary time spans. KW - transcriptome KW - evolution KW - de novo genes JF - eLife SN - 2050-084X PB - eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd ER -