Phylogenetic Footprints in Beta-actin Gene: Comparison of Human and Carp Homologs

This picture represents the comparison of human and carp beta-actin genes (ACUTS entry ACTB_3UT, GenBank entries M10277, M24113, aligned with LFasta).

Conserved regions between the two sequences are linked by grey areas, and are colored according to their degree of similarity. The structure of the gene and known regulatory elements are indicated by colored boxes:

 red    : protein-coding regions
 blue   : introns
 yellow : 5'UTR and 3'UTR
 green  : regulatory elements

As expected, protein-coding regions are highly conserved, and most of the non-coding parts of the gene show no sequence similarity. However, four discrete conserved elements are detected in non-coding regions. All these conserved non-coding regions correspond to regulatory elements:

1. Promoter (Liu et al, 1990)
2. Enhancer (Liu et al, 1990)
3. mRNA subcellular localisation signal (zipcode) (Kislauskis et al, 1994)
4. Transcriptional attenuator (DePonti-Zilli et al, 1988)