Transgenic enhancer assays also enable the activity of a human ncHAR sequence to be compared to its ortholog from chimpanzee or other mammals. Of 26 ncHAR enhancers that have been tested using both human and non-human primate sequences, seven drive human-specific expression patterns in mouse embryos at day 11.5. The tissues with differential expression

buy CAL-101 are limb (HAR2, 2xHAR114), eye (HAR25), forebrain (2xHAR142, 2xHAR238), and the midbrain–hindbrain boundary (2xHAR164, 2xHAR170). The functional implications of these expression differences remain to be discovered, but it is tempting to speculate that changes in the development of these tissues could influence human anatomy and traits such as fine motor skills, spoken language, and cognition. The past few years have seen a shift in HAR research from sequence based studies

to functional validations, including the discovery of several human-specific enhancers, suggesting that developmental gene regulatory changes played a significant role in human evolution. However, there are still many hurdles to linking genetic changes to divergent traits. One caveat of using transgenic mice or fish to assay HAR activity is that the trans environment is not identical to either human or chimpanzee. Indeed, trans regulatory factors have played a significant role in human evolution (Nowick, in this issue). However, a study that tested http://www.selleckchem.com/products/gkt137831.html orthologous human and zebrafish enhancers in both zebrafish and mouse found almost no trans effects [49]. Another problem is that only a small number of candidate enhancers can be screened with these relatively costly and time-intensive techniques. New genomic

technologies, such as massively parallel reporter assays [50 and 51] and genome editing [52], are opening the door to high-throughput screens of many HARs in model systems as well as human and non-human primate cells. These approaches will enable the validation and comparative analysis of HARs in more cell types and a larger range of developmental stages, which is critical for discovery of HARs with divergent enhancer activity. They may also lead to ways to easily test non-enhancer Racecadotril functions, such as insulators and repressors for which there are currently no straightforward assays. Without a doubt, we are likely to learn the molecular functions of many more HARs in the coming decade. But the critical downstream functional studies needed to link molecular changes to traits remain low-throughput and challenging for the foreseeable future. Perhaps as more humans are sequenced we will be able to study the traits of individuals with ancestral or mutant versions of HARs to discover functional effects at the population level. It will be particularly interesting to discover disease associations in HARs and to eventually unravel the roles HARs played in the evolution of human disease. In conclusion, it is important to remember that accelerated regions are not a human-specific trait.