How duplicated transcription regulators can diversify to govern the expression of nonoverlapping sets of genes
- J. Christian Pérez1,4,5,
- Polly M. Fordyce2,3,
- Matthew B. Lohse1,
- Victor Hanson-Smith1,
- Joseph L. DeRisi2,3 and
- Alexander D. Johnson1,2
- 1Department of Microbiology and Immunology, University of California at San Francisco, San Francisco, California 94102, USA;
- 2Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, University of California at San Francisco, San Francisco, California 94102, USA;
- 3Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Chevy Chase, Maryland 20815, USA
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.
Keywords
- transcription regulator
- molecular evolution
- Candida albicans
- gene regulation
- gene duplication
- regulatory networks
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.
This article is distributed exclusively by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press for the first six months after the full-issue publication date (see http://genesdev.cshlp.org/site/misc/terms.xhtml). After six months, it is available under a Creative Commons License (Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International), as described at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.