The Leeds team, in collaboration with scientists in Singapore, examined the repertoire of genes that REST regulates, in particular those which are expressed in the central nervous system. The team compared 16 whole genome sequences in fish, primates and humans to see where and how REST binds to them. Until now, the nature and extent of such variation has been unknown but the present study now completes some significant gaps in this knowledge.

Dr Wood says: "We were curious to look at REST and see what its functions are because it's present in all vertebrates and it is also thought it may have a role to play in certain brain functions, such as levels of intelligence. It was a massive undertaking just to collate all the data required and put it into the right order before we could start any kind of analysis. Our research has not only completed some significant gaps in this knowledge, but has also explained some of the detail behind the process of natural selection, which Darwin correctly identified, but couldn't explain."

Full bibliographic information: Evolution of the Vertebrate Gene Regulatory Network Controlled by the Transcriptional Repressor REST is published in Molecular Biology and Evolution 2009 26(7):1491-1507; doi:10.1093/molbev/msp058

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