Functional analysis of human and chimpanzee promoters (original) (raw)
Functional analysis of human and chimpanzee promoters
Twelve promoters of genes differentially expressed between humans and chimpanzees were tested for expression activity in culture cells. Seven promoters showed a significant difference in expression level between the human and chimpanzee promoter, but only three were in the same direction as the tissues, indicating that relevant expression differences between humans and chimpanzees will be difficult to predict from cell culture experiments or DNA sequences
Abstract Background: It has long been argued that changes in gene expression may provide an additional and crucial perspective on the evolutionary differences between humans and chimpanzees. To investigate how often expression differences seen in tissues are caused by sequence differences in the proximal promoters, we tested the expression activity in cultured cells of human and chimpanzee promoters from genes that differ in mRNA expression between human and chimpanzee tissues.