Comparative studies of upstream regions for intron-containing and
intronless paralogous genes in human genome
Andrei Gabrielian and Chinnappa D. Kodira
Celera Genomics, 45 West Guide Drive, Rockville, MD 20850
gabriean@celera.com, cdkodira@celera.com
Insertion of new retrotransposed genes into human genome may play an important
evolutionary role, widening the spectrum of action for existing genes. These genes have
intronless structure and frequently their expression is tissue-specific. We performed a genome wide search for and comparative analysis of such intronless (IL) genes and their introncontaining (IC) paralogs to answer the following questions:
1. Degree of conservation between upstream sequences.
2. Comparative analysis of known regulatory sites in upstream regions.
3. Search for common sequence patterns for IC and IL groups.
Details of gene annotation, upstream sequence analysis and possible evolutionary hypothesis
will be discussed.