Cis-regulatory mechanisms regulating gene expression in Caenorhabditis elegans chemosensory neurons.

摘要

During development of an organism, networks of transcription factors activate and repress expression of genes necessary to specify individual cell fates via distinct cis-regulatory motifs. These developmental networks ultimately lead to the specification of tissue and organ types, which contain highly specialized cells. The question of how the expression of cell-specific genes is regulated to generate a specialized cell type is investigated in detail in the C. elegans AWB chemosensory neuron type. We have found that C. elegans uses partially shared cell specific cis-regulatory motifs to control expression of chemoreceptor genes, while the expression of more broadly expressed genes is regulated via multiple additional pathways. Thus, the cell type-specific features of the AWB neuron type are conferred by multiple cis- and trans-regulatory mechanisms that act in parallel to regulate the expression of the appropriate gene subsets.