Co-opted transposons help perpetuate conserved higher-order chromosomal structures.
Mayank Nk ChoudharyRyan Z FriedmanJulia T WangHyo Sik JangXiaoyu ZhuoTing WangPublished in: Genome biology (2020)
TEs have long been considered a source of genetic innovation. By examining their contribution to genome topology, we show that TEs can contribute to regulatory plasticity by inducing redundancy and potentiating genetic drift locally while conserving genome architecture globally, revealing a paradigm for defining regulatory conservation in the noncoding genome beyond classic sequence-level conservation.