Long-range promoter–enhancer contacts are conserved during evolution and contribute to gene expression robustness

Long-range promoter–enhancer pairs are conserved in synteny. (A) Proportion of human promoter–enhancer (ENCODE) pairs maintained in synteny (i.e., found on the same chromosome, within a maximum distance of 2 Mb) in other vertebrate genomes for PCHi-C data (orange) and simulated data (blue). (B) Proportion of human promoter–enhancer pairs maintained in synteny in the mouse genome as a function of the distance between them in the human genome. (C) Same as B, for the comparison between human and opossum. (B,C) Bars represent 95% two-sided confidence intervals for the proportions (Methods). (*) Significant difference between PCHi-C and simulated data (FDR < 10⁻¹⁰) based on a chi-squared test.