Divergent MLS1 Promoters Lie on a Fitness Plateau for Gene Expression

Mutational scans reveal differential evolvability of Drosophila promoters and enhancers

Rapid enhancer and slow promoter evolution have been demonstrated through comparative genomics. However, it is not clear how this information is encoded genetically and if this can be used to place evolution in a predictive context. Part of the challenge is that our understanding of the potential for regulatory evolution is biased primarily toward natural variation or limited experimental perturbations. Here, to explore the evolutionary capacity of promoter variation, we surveyed an unbiased mutation library for three promoters in Drosophila melanogaster. We found that mutations in promoters had limited to no effect on spatial patterns of gene expression. Compared to developmental enhancers, promoters are more robust to mutations and have more access to mutations that can increase gene expression, suggesting that their low activity might be a result of selection. Consistent with these observations, increasing the promoter activity at the endogenous locus of shavenbaby led to increased transcription yet limited phenotypic changes. Taken together, developmental promoters may encode robust transcriptional outputs allowing evolvability through the integration of diverse developmental enhancers.

This article is part of the theme issue ‘Interdisciplinary approaches to predicting evolutionary biology’.

Mechanisms of regulatory evolution in yeast

Studies of regulatory variation in yeast - at the level of new mutations, polymorphisms within a species, and divergence between species - have provided great insight into the molecular and evolutionary processes responsible for the evolution of gene expression in eukaryotes. The increasing ease with which yeast genomes can be manipulated and expression quantified in a high-throughput manner has recently accelerated mechanistic studies of cis- and trans-regulatory variation at multiple evolutionary timescales. These studies have, for example, identified differences in the properties of cis- and trans-acting mutations that affect their evolutionary fate, experimentally characterized the molecular mechanisms through which cis- and trans-regulatory variants act, and illustrated how regulatory networks can diverge between species with or without changes in gene expression.

The evolution, evolvability and engineering of gene regulatory DNA

Mutations in non-coding regulatory DNA sequences can alter gene expression, organismal phenotype and fitness^1-3. Constructing complete fitness landscapes, in which DNA sequences are mapped to fitness, is a long-standing goal in biology, but has remained elusive because it is challenging to generalize reliably to vast sequence spaces^4-6. Here we build sequence-to-expression models that capture fitness landscapes and use them to decipher principles of regulatory evolution. Using millions of randomly sampled promoter DNA sequences and their measured expression levels in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, we learn deep neural network models that generalize with excellent prediction performance, and enable sequence design for expression engineering. Using our models, we study expression divergence under genetic drift and strong-selection weak-mutation regimes to find that regulatory evolution is rapid and subject to diminishing returns epistasis; that conflicting expression objectives in different environments constrain expression adaptation; and that stabilizing selection on gene expression leads to the moderation of regulatory complexity. We present an approach for using such models to detect signatures of selection on expression from natural variation in regulatory sequences and use it to discover an instance of convergent regulatory evolution. We assess mutational robustness, finding that regulatory mutation effect sizes follow a power law, characterize regulatory evolvability, visualize promoter fitness landscapes, discover evolvability archetypes and illustrate the mutational robustness of natural regulatory sequence populations. Our work provides a general framework for designing regulatory sequences and addressing fundamental questions in regulatory evolution.

Cis-regulatory variants affect gene expression dynamics in yeast

Evolution of cis-regulatory sequences depends on how they affect gene expression and motivates both the identification and prediction of cis-regulatory variants responsible for expression differences within and between species. While much progress has been made in relating cis-regulatory variants to expression levels, the timing of gene activation and repression may also be important to the evolution of cis-regulatory sequences. We investigated allele-specific expression (ASE) dynamics within and between Saccharomyces species during the diauxic shift and found appreciable cis-acting variation in gene expression dynamics. Within-species ASE is associated with intergenic variants, and ASE dynamics are more strongly associated with insertions and deletions than ASE levels. To refine these associations, we used a high-throughput reporter assay to test promoter regions and individual variants. Within the subset of regions that recapitulated endogenous expression, we identified and characterized cis-regulatory variants that affect expression dynamics. Between species, chimeric promoter regions generate novel patterns and indicate constraints on the evolution of gene expression dynamics. We conclude that changes in cis-regulatory sequences can tune gene expression dynamics and that the interplay between expression dynamics and other aspects of expression is relevant to the evolution of cis-regulatory sequences.

Fitness Effects of Cis-Regulatory Variants in the Saccharomyces cerevisiae TDH3 Promoter

Variation in gene expression is widespread within and between species, but fitness consequences of this variation are generally unknown. Here, we use mutations in the Saccharomyces cerevisiae TDH3 promoter to assess how changes in TDH3 expression affect cell growth. From these data, we predict the fitness consequences of de novo mutations and natural polymorphisms in the TDH3 promoter. Nearly all mutations and polymorphisms in the TDH3 promoter were found to have no significant effect on fitness in the environment assayed, suggesting that the wild-type allele of this promoter is robust to the effects of most new cis-regulatory mutations.

Parallel Evolution of Chromatin Structure Underlying Metabolic Adaptation

Parallel evolution occurs when a similar trait emerges in independent evolutionary lineages. Although changes in protein coding and gene transcription have been investigated as underlying mechanisms for parallel evolution, parallel changes in chromatin structure have never been reported. Here, Saccharomyces cerevisiae and a distantly related yeast species, Dekkera bruxellensis, are investigated because both species have independently evolved the capacity of aerobic fermentation. By profiling and comparing genome sequences, transcriptomic landscapes, and chromatin structures, we revealed that parallel changes in nucleosome occupancy in the promoter regions of mitochondria-localized genes led to concerted suppression of mitochondrial functions by glucose, which can explain the metabolic convergence in these two independent yeast species. Further investigation indicated that similar mutational processes in the promoter regions of these genes in the two independent evolutionary lineages underlay the parallel changes in chromatin structure. Our results indicate that, despite several hundred million years of separation, parallel changes in chromatin structure, can be an important adaptation mechanism for different organisms. Due to the important role of chromatin structure changes in regulating gene expression and organism phenotypes, the novel mechanism revealed in this study could be a general phenomenon contributing to parallel adaptation in nature.