[The role of conserved sequences in the regulatory elements of the Antp-like homeobox-containing genes of vertebrates].

By the present time the homeobox genes have been found in the representatives of the main invertebrate and vertebrate taxa. It has been demonstrated that these genes play the key role in the space and time genome expression orchestration in ontogenesis. The autoregulatory and cross-regulatory functional interactions integrate the homeobox genes into the gene networks. We found a correlation in variability of the coding and regulatory regions for vertebrate homeobox genes. The phylogenetic relations of structure and regulatory elements involved into the cross- and autoregulatory connections have been investigated in detail. The comprehensive phylogenetic analysis of the promoter region for these genes compared to results of such analysis of their homeoboxes has revealed two opposed tendencies in evolution of the regulatory elements of genes. The first trend is conservation of many regulatory elements in evolution of vertebrate homeobox genes and the second one is high variability of other non-coding gene regions.