Editorial

Gene regulation, evolvability and the limits of genomics

Miranda Robertson

• Correspondence: Miranda Robertson editorial@jbiol.com

Journal of Biology 2009, 8:94 doi:10.1186/jbiol209

Published: 24 December 2009

First paragraph (this article has no abstract)

Of the fundamental issues in biology that remain unresolved, one of the most prominent is that of the evolution of gene expression. Unlike proteins, in which conservation of function is largely reflected in conservation of primary sequence, conservation of function in the regulatory regions of genes seems to be maintained in the face of quite widely divergent primary sequence. Since the diversification of species depends much more on divergent gene expression than on divergent gene sequence (we famously share 95% of our genomic sequence with chimpanzees), the relationship of promoter structure to promoter function and the evolution of gene expression are a focus of considerable topical interest.