Highly conserved upstream sequences for transcription factor genes and implications for the regulatory network

Identifying evolutionarily conserved blocks in orthologous genomic sequences is an effective way to detect regulatory elements. In this study, with the aim of elucidating the architecture of the regulatory network, we systematically estimated the degree of conservation of the upstream sequences of 3,750 human-mouse orthologue pairs along 8-kb stretches. We found that the genes with high upstream conservation are predominantly transcription factor (TF) genes. In particular, developmental process-related TF genes showed significantly higher conservation of the upstream sequences than other TF genes. Such extreme upstream conservation of the developmental process-related TF genes suggests that the regulatory networks involved with developmental processes have been evolutionarily well conserved in both human and mouse lineages.