Researchers leaded by the ICREA professor Iñaki Ruiz-Trillo, from Institute of Evolutionay Biology (CSIC-UPF), reveal that increasing complexity of transcription factors is an essential factor in the evolution process of living organisms. Specially concerning the evolution from unicellular to pluricellular organisms. Results of the stuy were published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

The paper analyses the evolution of transcription factors in all eukaryotes. Transcription factors are proteins that bind to DNA and activate or repress gene expression, so they play important roles in animal development. The paper, thus, analyses the evolutionary history of all transcription factors in many eukaryotic genomes. The results show that both animals and plants have the most complex repertoire of transcription factors of all eukaryotic lineages, probably a result of their orchestrated embryonic development. Therefore, the great evolutionary success, the large variety of extant plant and animal forms,  was largely due to the acquisition of a complex transcriptional regulation machinery.

Ref article: Transcription factor evolution in eukaryotes and the assembly of the regulatory toolkit in multicellular lineages. 2013 PNAs ahead of print. Alex de Mendozaa,b,1, Arnau Sebé-Pedrósa,b,1, Martin Sebastijan _Sestakc, Marija Matej_ci_cc, Guifré Torruellaa,b,Tomislav Domazet-Lo_soc,d, and Iñaki Ruiz-Trillo.

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