RT Journal
A1 Roy, Sushmita
A1 Wapinski, Ilan
A1 Pfiffner, Jenna
A1 French, Courtney
A1 Socha, Amanda
A1 Konieczka, Jay
A1 Habib, Naomi
A1 Kellis, Manolis
A1 Thompson, Dawn
A1 Regev, Aviv
T1 Arboretum: Reconstruction and analysis of the evolutionary history of condition-specific transcriptional modules
JF Genome Research 
JO Genome Research 
YR 2013 
FD June 01 
VO 23 
IS 6 
SP 1039 
OP 1050 
DO 10.1101/gr.146233.112 
UL http://genome.cshlp.org/content/23/6/1039.abstract 
AB Comparative functional genomics studies the evolution of biological processes by analyzing functional data, such as gene expression profiles, across species. A major challenge is to compare profiles collected in a complex phylogeny. Here, we present Arboretum, a novel scalable computational algorithm that integrates expression data from multiple species with species and gene phylogenies to infer modules of coexpressed genes in extant species and their evolutionary histories. We also develop new, generally applicable measures of conservation and divergence in gene regulatory modules to assess the impact of changes in gene content and expression on module evolution. We used Arboretum to study the evolution of the transcriptional response to heat shock in eight species of Ascomycota fungi and to reconstruct modules of the ancestral environmental stress response (ESR). We found substantial conservation in the stress response across species and in the reconstructed components of the ancestral ESR modules. The greatest divergence was in the most induced stress, primarily through module expansion. The divergence of the heat stress response exceeds that observed in the response to glucose depletion in the same species. Arboretum and its associated analyses provide a comprehensive framework to systematically study regulatory evolution of condition-specific responses.