The loose evolutionary relationships between transcription factors and other gene products across prokaryotes

BACKGROUND: Tests for the evolutionary conservation of associations between genes coding for transcription factors (TFs) and other genes have been limited to a few model organisms due to the lack of experimental information of functional associations in other organisms. We aimed at surmounting this limitation by using the most co-occurring gene pairs as proxies for the most conserved functional interactions available for each gene in a genome. We then used genes predicted to code for TFs to compare their most conserved interactions against the most conserved interactions for the rest of the genes within each prokaryotic genome available. RESULTS: We plotted profiles of phylogenetic profiles, p-cubic, to compare the maximally scoring interactions of TFs against those of other genes. In most prokaryotes, genes coding for TFs showed lower co-occurrences when compared to other genes. We also show that genes coding for TFs tend to have lower Codon Adaptation Indexes compared to other genes. CONCLUSIONS: The co-occurrence tests suggest that transcriptional regulation evolves quickly in most, if not all, prokaryotes. The Codon Adaptation Index analyses suggest quick gene exchange and rewiring of transcriptional regulation across prokaryotes. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/1756-0500-7-928) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.