Selective Constraints in Experimentally Defined Primate Regulatory Regions

Abstract

Changes in gene regulation may be important in evolution. However, the evolutionary properties of regulatory mutations are currently poorly understood. This is partly the result of an incomplete annotation of functional regulatory DNA in many species. For example, transcription factor binding sites (TFBSs), a major component of eukaryotic regulatory architecture, are typically short, degenerate, and therefore difficult to differentiate from randomly occurring, nonfunctional sequences. Furthermore, although sites such as TFBSs can be computationally predicted using evolutionary conservation as a criterion, estimates of the true level of selective constraint (defined as the fraction of strongly deleterious mutations occurring at a locus) in regulatory regions will, by definition, be upwardly biased in datasets that are a priori evolutionarily conserved. Here we investigate the fitness effects of regulatory mutations using two complementary datasets of human TFBSs that are likely to be relatively free of ascertainment bias with respect to evolutionary conservation but, importantly, are supported by experimental data. The first is a collection of almost >2,100 human TFBSs drawn from the literature in the TRANSFAC database, and the second is derived from several recent high-throughput chromatin immunoprecipitation coupled with genomic microarray (ChIP-chip) analyses. We also define a set of putative cis-regulatory modules (pCRMs) by spatially clustering multiple TFBSs that regulate the same gene. We find that a relatively high proportion (∼37%) of mutations at TFBSs are strongly deleterious, similar to that at a 2-fold degenerate protein-coding site. However, constraint is significantly reduced in human and chimpanzee pCRMS and ChIP-chip sequences, relative to macaques. We estimate that the fraction of regulatory mutations that have been driven to fixation by positive selection in humans is not significantly different from zero. We also find that the level of selective constraint in our TFBSs, pCRMs, and ChIP-chip sequences is negatively correlated with the expression breadth of the regulated gene, whereas the opposite relationship holds at that gene's nonsynonymous and synonymous sites. Finally, we find that the rate of protein evolution in a transcription factor appears to be positively correlated with the breadth of expression of the gene it regulates. Our study suggests that strongly deleterious regulatory mutations are considerably more likely (1.6-fold) to occur in tissue-specific than in housekeeping genes, implying that there is a fitness cost to increasing “complexity” of gene expression.

Author Summary

Changes in gene expression have been suggested to play a major role in mammalian evolution. In eukaryotes, gene expression is primarily controlled by sites, such as transcription factor binding sites (TFBSs), located in the noncoding region of the genome. The majority of these TFBSs remain unannotated, however, because they are typically short, degenerate, and laborious to identify experimentally. As a result, the effects of mutations in TFBSs on organism fitness remain poorly understood. We collected a dataset of TFBSs derived from the experimental biology literature and recent high-throughput studies to estimate the proportions of new mutations in TFBSs that have strongly deleterious and strongly beneficial effects upon organism fitness. We find that a relatively high proportion of new mutations in TFBSs are strongly deleterious, although it appears that relatively few are adaptive. We also demonstrate that the fraction of strongly deleterious regulatory mutations is correlated with the breadth of expression of the regulated gene. Thus, ubiquitously expressed genes are likely to experience fewer deleterious regulatory mutations than those expressed in a small number of tissues.