Touceda-Suárez, MaríaKita, Elizabeth M.Acemel, Rafael D.Firbas, Panos N.Magri, Marta S.Naranjo, SilviaTena, Juan J.Gómez Skarmeta, José LuisMaeso, IgnacioIrimia Martínez, Manuel2020-10-202020-10-202020Touceda-Suárez M, Kita EM, Acemel RD, Firbas PN, Magri MS, Naranjo S et al. Ancient genomic regulatory blocks are a source for regulatory gene deserts in vertebrates after whole-genome duplications. Mol Biol Evol. 2020 Oct 1; 37(10): 2857-2864. DOI: 10.1093/molbev/msaa1230737-4038http://hdl.handle.net/10230/45512We investigated how the two rounds of whole-genome duplication that occurred at the base of the vertebrate lineage have impacted ancient microsyntenic associations involving developmental regulators (known as genomic regulatory blocks, GRBs). We showed that the majority of GRBs identified in the last common ancestor of chordates have been maintained as a single copy in humans. We found evidence that dismantling of the duplicated GRB copies occurred early in vertebrate evolution often through the differential retention of the regulatory gene but loss of the bystander gene's exonic sequences. Despite the large evolutionary scale, the presence of duplicated highly conserved noncoding regions provided unambiguous proof for this scenario for multiple ancient GRBs. Remarkably, the dismantling of ancient GRB duplicates has contributed to the creation of large gene deserts associated with regulatory genes in vertebrates, providing a potentially widespread mechanism for the origin of these enigmatic genomic traits.application/pdfeng© María Touceda -Suárez et al. 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution.This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium,provided the original work is properly cited.GenòmicaGenèticaVertebratsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/articlehttp://dx.doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msaa123info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess