Rewiring the transcriptional regulatory circuits of cells 英文参考文献.docVIP

Minireview Rewiring the transcriptional regulatory circuits of cells Devin R Scannell and Ken Wolfe Address: Department of Genetics, Smurfit Institute, University of Dublin, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland. Correspondence: Ken Wolfe. E-mail: khwolfe@tcd.ie Published: 29 January 2004 Genome Biology 2004, 5:206 The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at /2004/5/2/206 ? 2004 BioMed Central Ltd Abstract The molecular mechanisms that regulate gene expression can evolve either by changing the cis- acting DNA elements in promoters, or by replacing the trans-acting regulatory proteins. New data from yeast species show that both processes can happen. Whether you’re driving a Cadillac or an electric golf buggy, you put your foot on the accelerator and it goes. Most of us don’t care what’s happening in the engine so long as it does what we want it to do, and which vehicle we choose depends on whether we want to drive across the country or across the fairway. Natural selection is a bit like us uninformed motorists: it favors organisms that work well in a particular context, without prejudice as to what is the best mechanism to achieve this. But the catch about evolution is that every organism has been produced by descent with modification from ancestor organisms that worked, so an engineer cannot just design your ‘golf buggy’ from scratch. To push the analogy, it has to be made from a Model T Ford by continu- ally adding, subtracting or modifying parts, keeping the car running all the time. elements do not evolve within a clearly defined structural framework such as that imposed by the triplet code, nor do they exhibit the close relationship between sequence and function that exists in coding regions. So, although incredi- ble progress has been made in the last decade in molecular evolutionary studies of genes and genomes (see