For a quick overview of GRB, we have made an animated introduction (
QuickTime movie; the movie is under construction – please check periodically for an updated version) . Enjoy! :)
During vertebrate evolution, large genome segments have been kept in synteny by the need to keep long-range cis-regulatory elements in cis with their target gene. We have named such regions genomic regulatory blocks (GRBs). They contain highly conserved non-coding elements (HCNEs, green ovals in the above figure), developmental and/or transcriptional factor genes (target gene, red in the figure above) regulated by the HCNEs, and other unrelated genes (bystander genes, yellow in the figure above). We have designed Synorth as a resource to facilitate the study of how the content in GRBs has changed, in particular following the whole-genome duplication in the teleost fish lineage.
For further reading, we recommend the following papers: