Emergence of novel cephalopod gene regulation and expression through large-scale genome reorganization.

Nat Commun. 2022 Apr 21;13(1):2172. doi:10.1038/s41467-022-29694-7

Schmidbaur H, Kawaguchi A, Clarence T, Fu X, Hoang OP, Zimmermann B, Ritschard EA, Weissenbacher A, Foster JS, Nyholm SV, Bates PA, Albertin CB, Tanaka E, Simakov O.

Defines “microsyntenic blocks as at least three or more co-occurring orthologous genes with up to five intervening genes with no constraints on their collinearity”. Found 505 microsyntenies unique to cephalopods and 275 unique to metazooans. “Genes in cephalopod-specific microsyntenies do not tend to be co-expressed, despite their tight co-localization” “In contrast [to cephalopod-specific microsyntenies], conserved metazoan microsyntenies show significant (Wilcoxon test, p ≤ 0.001) co-expression when compared to simulated microsyntenies”