Conservation of Enhancer Regulation in Primates

In the news article posted on phys.org, the phylogenetic study by researchers at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and Cornell University to investigate specific roles of enhancer transcription factors in primate evolution. The news article focuses on the basic concept of evolutionary conservation, however the research article published about the findings of the experimentation is more elaborate. The researchers measured nascent transcription of resting and activated CD4+ T cells in multiple human, chimpanzee, rhesus macaque, and rodent individuals to circumvent post-transcriptional interference. They measured overall conservation with species-specific irregularities, especially at distal enhancers and non-coding RNAs. They also noted that genes regulated by more enhancers tended to have more conserved expression profiles. Finally, the researchers identified mutations causing human-specific transcription and experimentally validated their findings.

- Evan Holmes