How duplicated transcription regulators can diversify to govern the expression of nonoverlapping sets of genes

  1. Alexander D. Johnson1,2
  1. 1Department of Microbiology and Immunology, University of California at San Francisco, San Francisco, California 94102, USA;
  2. 2Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, University of California at San Francisco, San Francisco, California 94102, USA;
  3. 3Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Chevy Chase, Maryland 20815, USA
    • 4 Present address: Institute for Molecular Infection Biology, University Würzburg, 97080 Würzburg, Germany

    Abstract

    The duplication of transcription regulators can elicit major regulatory network rearrangements over evolutionary timescales. However, few examples of duplications resulting in gene network expansions are understood in molecular detail. Here we show that four Candida albicans transcription regulators that arose by successive duplications have differentiated from one another by acquiring different intrinsic DNA-binding specificities, different preferences for half-site spacing, and different associations with cofactors. The combination of these three mechanisms resulted in each of the four regulators controlling a distinct set of target genes, which likely contributed to the adaption of this fungus to its human host. Our results illustrate how successive duplications and diversification of an ancestral transcription regulator can underlie major changes in an organism’s regulatory circuitry.

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    Footnotes

    • 5 Corresponding author

      E-mail christian.perez{at}uni-wuerzburg.de or jchris_perez{at}yahoo.com

    • Supplemental material is available for this article.

    • Article published online ahead of print. Article and publication date are online at http://www.genesdev.org/cgi/doi/10.1101/gad.242271.114.

    • Received March 25, 2014.
    • Accepted May 13, 2014.

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