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Letter
Nature Genetics  37, 544 - 548 (2005)
Published online: 24 April 2005; | doi:10.1038/ng1554

The transcriptional consequences of mutation and natural selection in Caenorhabditis elegans

Dee R Denver1, 5, Krystalynne Morris2, J Todd Streelman3, Stuart K Kim4, Michael Lynch1 & W Kelley Thomas2

1  Department of Biology, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana 47405, USA.

2  Hubbard Center for Genome Studies, University of New Hampshire, Durham, New Hampshire 03824, USA.

3  School of Biology, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia 30332, USA.

4  Department of Developmental Biology, Stanford University Medical Center, Stanford, California 94305, USA.

5  Present address: Allan Wilson Centre for Molecular Ecology and Evolution, Massey University, Auckland, New Zealand.

Correspondence should be addressed to Dee R Denver d.denver@massey.ac.nz
The evolutionary importance of gene-expression divergence is unclear: some studies suggest that it is an important mechanism for evolution by natural selection1, 2, whereas others claim that most between-species regulatory changes are neutral or nearly neutral3. We examined global transcriptional divergence patterns in a set of Caenorhabditis elegans mutation-accumulation lines and natural isolate lines to provide insights into the evolutionary importance of transcriptional variation and to discriminate between the forces of mutation and natural selection in shaping the evolution of gene expression. We detected the effects of selection on transcriptional divergence patterns and characterized them with respect to coexpressed gene sets, chromosomal clustering of expression changes and functional gene categories. We directly compared observed transcriptional variation patterns in the mutation-accumulation and natural isolate lines to a neutral model of transcriptome evolution to show that strong stabilizing selection dominates the evolution of transcriptional change for thousands of C. elegans expressed sequences.


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Nature Genetics
ISSN: 1061-4036
EISSN: 1546-1718
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