Lineage-specific regulatory elements underlie adaptation of species and play a role in disease susceptibility. We compared functionally conserved and lineage-specific enhancers by cross-mapping 5042 human and 6564 mouse heart enhancers. Of these, 79 per cent are lineage-specific, lacking a functional orthologue. Heart enhancers tend to cluster and, commonly, there are multiple heart enhancers i...

Background: Super-enhancers are clusters of active enhancers densely occupied by the Mediators, transcription factors and chromatin regulators, control expression of cell identity and disease associated genes. Current studies demonstrated the possibility of multiple factors with important roles in super-enhancer formation; however, a systematic analysis to asses the relative contribution of chr...

The amino acid business is a multi-billion dollar enterprise. All twenty amino acids are sold, albeit each in greatly different quantities (Table 1). Amino acids are used as animal feed additives (lysine, methionine, threonine), flavor enhancers (monosodium glutamic, serine, aspartic acid) and as specialty nutrients in the medical field. Glutamic acid, lysine and methionine account for the majo...

For ∼30 million years, the eggs of Hawaiian Drosophila were laid in ever-changing environments caused by high rates of island formation. The associated diversification of the size and developmental rate of the syncytial fly embryo would have altered morphogenic gradients, thus necessitating frequent evolutionary compensation of transcriptional responses. We investigate the consequences these ra...

Splicing enhancers are RNA sequences required for accurate splice site recognition and the control of alternative splicing. In this study, we used an in vitro selection procedure to identify and characterize novel RNA sequences capable of functioning as pre-mRNA splicing enhancers. Randomized 18-nucleotide RNA sequences were inserted downstream from a Drosophila doublesex pre-mRNA enhancer-depe...

This promise, however, is not fully realised because, for many molecules, the skin constitutes a significant barrier. A variety of approaches have been proposed to reversibly breach this barrier, the most significant are the ‘passive’ approach involving the use of chemical penetration enhancers, and the more recent active approaches such as iontophoresis (use of a electrical potential to enhanc...