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Published January 9, 2014 | Supplemental Material + Published
Journal Article Open

A Reporter Assay in Lamprey Embryos Reveals Both Functional Conservation and Elaboration of Vertebrate Enhancers

Abstract

The sea lamprey is an important model organism for investigating the evolutionary origins of vertebrates. As more vertebrate genome sequences are obtained, evolutionary developmental biologists are becoming increasingly able to identify putative gene regulatory elements across the breadth of the vertebrate taxa. The identification of these regions makes it possible to address how changes at the genomic level have led to changes in developmental gene regulatory networks and ultimately to the evolution of morphological diversity. Comparative genomics approaches using sea lamprey have already predicted a number of such regulatory elements in the lamprey genome. Functional characterisation of these sequences and other similar elements requires efficient reporter assays in lamprey. In this report, we describe the development of a transient transgenesis method for lamprey embryos. Focusing on conserved non-coding elements (CNEs), we use this method to investigate their functional conservation across the vertebrate subphylum. We find instances of both functional conservation and lineage-specific functional evolution of CNEs across vertebrates, emphasising the utility of functionally testing homologous CNEs in their host species.

Additional Information

© 2014 Parker et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Received: August 19, 2013; Accepted: December 5, 2013; Published: January 9, 2014. This work was supported by MRC core funding (U117597141) to GE and grants GM090049 and DE017911 to MEB. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. We thank Natalya Nikitina, Benjamin Uy, Melinda Modrell and Marcos Simoes-Costa for advice and assistance on lamprey husbandry. We thank Heather Callaway for zebrafish maintenance. Author Contributions: Conceived and designed the experiments: HP GE TSS MB. Performed the experiments: HP TSS. Analyzed the data: HP. Contributed reagents/ materials/analysis tools: GE MB. Wrote the paper: HP GE.

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Published - journal.pone.0085492.pdf

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Supplemental Material - journal.pone.0085492.s004.doc

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Additional details

Created:
August 19, 2023
Modified:
October 25, 2023