Our first meeting of 2016 is scheduled for 12:00 on the 25th of January in room 3160 in the Discovery building. The room may be subject to change. The paper selection is Enhancer Evolution across 20 Mammalian Species, available online at the link. We will allot some time at the beginning of our meeting to discuss paper suggestions and themes we would like to cover this semester.

The abstract of the paper is as follows. Please feel free to begin our discussion in the comments section below.

The mammalian radiation has corresponded with rapid changes in noncoding regions of the genome, but we lack a comprehensive understanding of regulatory evolution in mammals. Here, we track the evolution of promoters and enhancers active in liver across 20 mammalian species from six diverse orders by profiling genomic enrichment of H3K27 acetylation and H3K4 trimethylation. We report that rapid evolution of enhancers is a universal feature of mammalian genomes. Most of the recently evolved enhancers arise from ancestral DNA exaptation, rather than lineage-specific expansions of repeat elements. In contrast, almost all liver promoters are partially or fully conserved across these species. Our data further reveal that recently evolved enhancers can be associated with genes under positive selection, demonstrating the power of this approach for annotating regulatory adaptations in genomic sequences. These results provide important insight into the functional genetics underpinning mammalian regulatory evolution.

We look forward to seeing those who can attend soon.