Bidirectional promoters of insects: genome-wide comparison, evolutionary implication and influence on gene expression

Bidirectional promoters are widespread in insect genomes. By analyzing 23 insect genomes we show that the frequency of bidirectional gene pairs varies according to genome compactness and density of genes among the species. The density of bidirectional genes expected based on number of genes per megabase of genome explains the observed density suggesting that bidirectional pairing of genes may be due to random event. We identified specific transcription factor binding motifs that are enriched in bidirectional promoters across insect species. Furthermore, we observed that bidirectional promoters may act as transcriptional hotspots in insect genomes where protein coding genes tend to aggregate in significantly biased (p < 0.001) manner compared to unidirectional promoters. Natural selection seems to have an association with the extent of bidirectionality of genes among the species. The rate of non-synonymous-to-synonymous changes (dN/dS) shows a second-order polynomial distribution with bidirectionality between species indicating that bidirectionality is dependent upon evolutionary pressure acting on the genomes. Analysis of genome-wide microarray expression data of multiple insect species suggested that bidirectionality has a similar association with transcriptome variation across species. Furthermore, bidirectional promoters show significant association with correlated expression of the divergent gene pairs depending upon their motif composition. Analysis of gene ontology showed that bidirectional genes tend to have a common association with functions related to "binding" (including ion binding, nucleotide binding and protein binding) across genomes. Such functional constraint of bidirectional genes may explain their widespread persistence in genome of diverse insect species.