Characterization of the boundaries between adjacent rapidly and slowly evolving genomic regions in Drosophila

The site of a dramatic change in the rate of DNA sequence evolution exists near the 68C glue gene clusters of several Drosophila species. We have previously determined the approximate location of this transition site by comparison of restriction maps of the regions flanking the 68C-like glue gene cluster of five members of the melanogaster species subgroup. In the present work we report the sequence of the transition region in three of these Drosophila species: D. melanogaster, D. yakuba, and D. erecta. Using a best-fit alignment of these sequences, we find that the site of transition from slowly to rapidly evolving sequences occurs abruptly within a region less than 50 nucleotides in length. Although frequency of nucleotide substitutions changes as much as 10-fold across this boundary, frequency of small insertion/deletion events stays nearly constant.