RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Enhancer sharing promotes neighborhoods of transcriptional regulation across eukaryotes
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 061218
DO 10.1101/061218
A1 Porfirio Quintero-Cadena
A1 Paul W. Sternberg
YR 2016
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/06/28/061218.abstract
AB Enhancers physically interact with transcriptional promoters, looping over distances that can span multiple regulatory elements. Given that enhancer-promoter (EP) interactions generally occur via common protein complexes, it is unclear whether EP pairing is predominantly deterministic or proximity guided. Here we present cross-organismic evidence suggesting that most EP pairs are compatible, largely determined by physical proximity rather than specific interactions. By re-analyzing transcriptome datasets, we find that the transcription of gene neighbors is correlated over distances that scale with genome size. We experimentally show that non-specific EP interactions can explain such correlation, and that EP distance acts as a scaling factor for the transcriptional influence of an enhancer. We propose that enhancer sharing is commonplace among eukaryotes, and that EP distance is an important layer of information in gene regulation.