Intrinsic cooperativity potentiates parallel cis-regulatory evolution
- University of California, San Francisco, United States
- Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, United States
Abstract
Convergent evolutionary events in independent lineages provide an opportunity to understand why evolution favors certain outcomes over others. We studied such a case where a large set of genes-those coding for the ribosomal proteins-gained cis-regulatory sequences for a particular transcription regulator (Mcm1) in independent fungal lineages. We present evidence that these gains occurred because Mcm1 shares a mechanism of transcriptional activation with an ancestral regulator of the ribosomal protein genes, Rap1. Specifically, we show that Mcm1 and Rap1 have the inherent ability to cooperatively activate transcription through contacts with the general transcription factor TFIID. Because the two regulatory proteins share a common interaction partner, the presence of one ancestral cis-regulatory sequence can 'channel' random mutations into functional sites for the second regulator. At a genomic scale, this type of intrinsic cooperativity can account for a pattern of parallel evolution involving the fixation of hundreds of substitutions.
Data availability
Interspecies hybrid expression data is available at the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) repository under accession number GSE108389. Flow cytometry data is available at Flow Repository under accession numbers FR-FCM-ZYWS, FR-FCM-ZYWT, FR-FCM-ZYWU, FR-FCM-ZYWV, FR-FCM-ZYJZ, FR-FCM-ZYJY, and FR-FCM-ZYJ2. Code used in computational analyses is available at doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1341284.
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Interspecies hybrid expression dataPublicly available at the NCBI Gene Expression Omnibus (accession no: GSE108389).
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
National Institutes of Health (GM115892)
- Amanda N Johnson
- Jordan T Feigerle
- P Anthony Weil
National Institutes of Health (GM037049)
- Trevor R Sorrells
- Conor J Howard
- Candace S Britton
- Kyle R Fowler
- Alexander D Johnson
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2018, Sorrells et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Intrinsic cooperativity potentiates parallel cis-regulatory evolution
eLife 7:e37563.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.37563
