Cis-regulatory variation: significance in biomedicine and evolution

Simon Friedensohn1, Ritwick Sawarkar

  • 1Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering, ETH Zurich, Mattenstrasse 26, 4058, Basel, Switzerland.

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The genomes of eukaryotes are punctuated by long stretches of sequence which do not code for proteins or RNAs. Although some of these regions do contain crucial regulatory sequences, the vast majority of this DNA serves no known function. Typically, these regions of the genome are the ones in which the fastest change, in evolutionary terms, is observed, because there is typically little to no selection pressure acting on these regions to preserve their sequences.
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