Distance conservation of transcriptional and splicing regulatory motifs

Abstract

The distance conservation is a new kind of genomic evolutionary conservation. The transcriptional and splicing regulatory k-mer motifs are functionally important DNA sequence elements. We demonstrated that there exist the evolutionarily conservation of the distance between these k-mer pairs in genomic sequences. This kind of conservation is not based on the strict location of bases in genome sequences, and does not depend on excess frequency of occurrence of k-mers. By utilizing the conservation of k-mer distance it is possible to design a non-alignment-based approach to quickly identify transcriptional or splicing regulatory motifs on the genome-wide scale. In this paper we will summarize our previous studies on distance conservation, introduce the method of distance conservation and indicate the prospects of its application.