Underrepresentation of active histone modification marks in evolutionarily young genes

作     者：Daqi Yu Wenwen Shi Yong E. Zhang 

作者机构：State Key Laboratory of Integrated Management of Pest Insects and Rodents & Key Laboratory of the Zoological Systematics andEvolution Institute of Zoology Chinese Academy of Sciences Beijing 100101 China 

出 版 物：《Insect Science》 (昆虫科学（英文版）)

年 卷 期：2017年第24卷第2期

页      面：174-186页

核心收录：

学科分类：0710[理学-生物学] 07[理学] 08[工学] 09[农学] 071007[理学-遗传学] 0901[农学-作物学] 0836[工学-生物工程] 090102[农学-作物遗传育种] 

基　　金：国家973计划 中国博士后科学基金 supported by grants from the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences supported by the HPC Platform, Scientific Information Center, Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences 

主　　题：Drosophila H3K4me3 H3K36me3 H3K9me3 epigenetic evolution newgene evolution 

摘      要：It is known that evolutionarily new genes can rapidly evolve essential roles in fundamental biological processes. Nevertheless, the underlying molecular mechanism of how they acquire theft novel transcriptional pattern is less characterized except for the role ofcis-regulatory evolution. Epigenetic modification offers an alternative possibility. Here, we examined how histone modifications have changed among different gene age groups in Drosophila melanogaster by integrative analyses of an updated new gene dataset and published epigenomic data. We found a robust pattern across various datasets where both the coverage and intensity of active histone modifications, histone 3 lysine 4 trimethylation and lysine 36 trimethylation, increased with evolutionary age. Such a temporal correlation is negative and much weaker for the repressive histone mark, lysine 9 trimethylation, which is expected given its major association with heterochromatin. By further comparison with neighboring old genes, the depletion of active marks of new genes could be only partially explained by the local epigenetic context. All these data are consistent with the observation that older genes bear relatively higher expression levels and suggest that the evolution of histone modifications could be implicated in transcriptional evolution after gene birth.