Evolutionary rates and centrality in the yeast gene regulatory network.docVIP

Open Access Research 2009JovelinVolumeand10, IPhillipsssue 4, Article R35 Evolutionary rates and centrality in the yeast gene regulatory network Richard Jovelin and Patrick C Phillips Address: Center for Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, 5289 University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403, USA. Correspondence: Richard Jovelin. Email: rjovelin@ Published: 9 April 2009 Received: 9 October 2008 Accepted: 9 April 2009 Genome Biology 2009, 10:R35 (doi:10.1186/gb-2009-10-4-r35) The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at /2009/10/4/R35 ? 2009 Jovelin and Phillips; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. NetworkpYeastcentralitytranscriptandion evolutionfactors that are more central in the transcription network tend to evolve more quickly./p Abstract Background: Transcription factors play a fundamental role in regulating physiological responses and developmental processes. Here we examine the evolution of the yeast transcription factors in the context of the structure of the gene regulatory network. Results: In contrast to previous results for the protein-protein interaction and metabolic networks, we find that the position of a gene within the transcription network affects the rate of protein evolution such that more central transcription factors tend to evolve faster. Centrality is also positively correlated with expression variability, suggesting that the higher rate of divergence among central transcription factors may be due to their role in controlling information flow and may be the result of adaptation to changing environmental conditions. Alternatively, more central transcription factors could be more buffered against environmental pertur