Late replication domains are evolutionary conserved in the Drosophila genome

PLoS One. 2013 Dec 31;8(12):e83319. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0083319. eCollection 2013.

Abstract

Drosophila chromosomes are organized into distinct domains differing in their predominant chromatin composition, replication timing and evolutionary conservation. We show on a genome-wide level that genes whose order has remained unaltered across 9 Drosophila species display late replication timing and frequently map to the regions of repressive chromatin. This observation is consistent with the existence of extensive domains of repressive chromatin that replicate extremely late and have conserved gene order in the Drosophila genome. We suggest that such repressive chromatin domains correspond to a handful of regions that complete replication at the very end of S phase. We further demonstrate that the order of genes in these regions is rarely altered in evolution. Substantial proportion of such regions significantly coincide with large synteny blocks. This indicates that there are evolutionary mechanisms maintaining the integrity of these late-replicating chromatin domains. The synteny blocks corresponding to the extremely late-replicating regions in the D. melanogaster genome consistently display two-fold lower gene density across different Drosophila species.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Animals
  • Chromatin / genetics
  • Chromosome Mapping
  • Chromosomes, Insect / genetics
  • DNA Replication Timing / genetics*
  • Drosophila / genetics*
  • Drosophila melanogaster / genetics
  • Evolution, Molecular
  • Genome, Insect*
  • Species Specificity
  • Synteny*

Substances

  • Chromatin

Grants and funding

The research was funded by program of Russian Academy of Sciences “Molecular and Cellular Biology” 6.3; Integration projects of SB RAS #51 and #82, and the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (#13-04-01669-a). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.