Systematic Identification, Characterization, and Conservation of Adjacent-Gene Coregulation in the Budding Yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae

Abstract

The spatial positioning of genes throughout the genome arrangement can alter their expression in many eukaryotic organisms. Often this results in a genomic context-specific effect on transcription. One example of this is through the clustering of functionally related genes, which results in adjacent-gene coregulation in the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae . In the present study, we set out to systematically characterize the prevalence of this phenomenon, finding the genomic organization of functionally related genes into clusters is a characteristic of myriad gene families. These arrangements are found in many evolutionarily divergent fungi and thus represent a widespread, yet underappreciated, layer of transcriptional regulation.