Greg Elgar

..Despite their extreme sequence conservation in vertebrates, sequences homologous to CNEs have not been identified in invertebrates...

..These receptors belong to family 2 GPCRs and most of their members are duplicated in teleosts although the reason why both persist in the genome is unknown...

..It is as yet unclear whether these sequences are 'below the radar' of current sequence alignment tools or whether their functional homology is not sequence based...

..I will also discuss the evolution of these elements, and examine their emerging and likely roles in disease. Together these analyses are starting to unravel how conserved non-coding regions function at the molecular level...

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..Despite this, there remains little in the way of user-friendly access to a large dataset of such elements in conjunction with the analysis and the visualization tools needed to study them...

..This chapter describes the identification and characterization of these elements, with particular reference to their composition and organization...

..We have exploited fish-mammal genomic alignments to identify and compare more than 800 conserved non-coding elements (CNEs) that associate with genes that have undergone fish-specific duplication and retention...

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..We propose a model whereby gene duplication and the evolution of cis-regulatory elements can be considered in the context of increased morphological diversity and the emergence of the modern vertebrate body plan...

..The Fugu-human genome synteny views are available for each Fugu scaffold through the clonesearch web page located at the Fugu Genomics website (http://fugu.rfcgr.mrc.ac.uk/)...

..We also discuss their fundamental place within gene regulatory networks and the likely influence of cis-regulatory elements over their differential roles during early animal development...

..While we are only at the advent of making these discoveries, the next decade promises to be a very exciting and rewarding time for genome researchers...

..Comparative sequence analyses of amino acid residues in the active site region suggest these additional sequences have evolved new and as yet unknown functions...

..Time, location, and quantity of reporter gene expression are congruent with part of the pattern previously reported for endogenous GLI3 transcription...

..Nonetheless, a combination of experimental, computational and comparative data is likely to reveal aspects of complex regulatory networks in vertebrates, just as it has already done for simple eukaryotic genomes...

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..Conserved linkages between Fugu and human genes indicate the preservation of chromosomal segments from the common vertebrate ancestor, but with considerable scrambling of gene order...

..Comparison with zebrafish substantiates previously observed linkages between class III region orthologues and hints at an ancient conserved class III region...

..These data demonstrate that the zebrafish:Fugu system is a powerful and convenient tool for dissecting both vertebrate gene regulation and gene function in vivo...

..This is particularly timely with the increasing availability of draft genome sequence from different organisms and the mounting emphasis on gene function and regulation...

..In this review, the relationship between fish species is examined along with the role of different fish models in a wide range of biological disciplines...

..This review describes progress made in this kind of comparison, from small regions of individual genes, to whole genome alignments...

..These highly conserved non-coding sequences are likely to form part of the genomic circuitry that uniquely defines vertebrate development...

..The analysis reveals a novel, sharp and distinct signal of nucleotide frequency bias precisely at the border between CNEs and flanking regions...

..This enables us to provide the first systematic estimate of the genomic range for distal cis-regulatory interactions in the human genome: half of CNEs are >250 kb away from their associated gene...

..The novel genes identified, which are also present in other vertebrate genomes, may play a role in inhibiting myotube formation in vertebrate muscle...

..This work demonstrates the value of using Fugu in comparative genomics, which has allowed identification of new putative regulatory elements, as well as corroborating enhancers identified by the more traditional deletion mapping method...

..The hypothesis that intron length might be functionally relevant to the DMD gene regulation is proposed and substantiated by the finding that dystrophin intron gigantism is common to the three vertebrate genes...

..Meanwhile, it is important to be cautious in making judgements of the effect of cryopreservation technique in assisted reproduction. This is the first report on the effect of cryopreservation on mtDNA...

..Phylogenetic analysis suggests that fast skeletal MYHs evolved independently in teleosts and tetrapods after fast skeletal MYHs had diverged from four ancestral MYHs...

..The Penelope-Xena lineage is apparently a basal group within the retrotransposons and therefore represents an evolutionarily important class of retroelement...