A novel measure of non-coding genome conservation identifies genomic regulatory blocks within primates

摘要

Motivation Clusters of extremely conserved non-coding elements (CNEs) mark genomic regions devoted to cis-regulation of key developmental genes in Metazoa. We have recently shown that their span coincides with that of topologically associating domains (TADs), making them useful for estimating conserved TAD boundaries in the absence of Hi-C data. The standard approach-detecting CNEs in genome alignments and then establishing the boundaries of their clusters-requires tuning of several parameters and breaks down when comparing closely related genomes.