bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/104323; this version posted January 30, 2017. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. Regulatory DNA in A. thaliana can tolerate high levels of sequence divergence 1 1 1 1 1 Alexandre CM , Urton JR , Jean-Baptiste K , Dorrity MW , Cuperus JC , Sullivan 2 3 3 4 4 4 1 AM , Bemm F , Jolic D , Arsovski AA , Thompson A , Nemhauser JL , Fields S , 3 1,# 1 Weigel D , Bubb KL , Queitsch C 1 Department of Genome Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, 98195, USA 2 Altius Institute for Biomedical Sciences, Seattle, WA, 98121, USA 3 Department of Molecular Biology, Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, Tübingen, Germany 4 Department of Biology, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, 98195, USA # Correspondence:
[email protected] bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/104323; this version posted January 30, 2017. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. ABSTRACT Variation in regulatory DNA is thought to drive evolution. Cross-species comparisons of regulatory DNA have provided evidence for both weak purifying selection and substantial turnover in regulatory regions. However, disruption of transcription factor binding sites can affect the expression of neighboring genes.