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Genome evolution

Making sense of antisense transcription

Nature Reviews Genetics volume 6, page 252 (2005)Cite this article

They reason that separation between two neighbouring overlapping genes with a sense–antisense relationship would be negatively selected through evolution. Database searches and Antisensor algorithms allowed the authors to identify 236 sense–antisense gene pairs in human with orthologues in pufferfish. Of these, 23.3% remained consecutive and preserved their orientation in pufferfish. Sense–antisense pairs tend to maintain their gene order significantly more often than genes that originate from the same strand, which implies that NAT constrains gene-order rearrangements.

Intriguingly, the authors found that the average distance between 'same-strand' gene pairs is 11-fold larger in humans than in pufferfish, in contrast to a 2.5-fold difference for antisense gene pairs. Could antisense transcription affect genome expansion? Further comparisons between mammalian genomes support the view that NAT sets a rigorous control on genome expansion and affects mammalian evolution in a manner similar to that observed for humans and fish.

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ORIGINAL RESEARCH PAPER

  1. Dahary, D. et al. Naturally occuring antisense: transcriptional leakage or real overlap? Genome Res. March 2005 (10.1011/gr3308405)

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Authors
  1. Ekat Kritikou
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Kritikou, E. Making sense of antisense transcription. Nat Rev Genet 6, 252 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrg1597

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