Evolution of conserved secondary structures and their function in transcriptional regulation networks

Background: Many conserved secondary structures have been identified within conserved elements in the human genome, but only a small fraction of them are known to be functional RNAs. The evolutionary variations of these conserved secondary structures in h

We thank Zhou-Hai Zhu and Wei Jin for assisting in the preparation of figures and Xing-Lai Ji and Jiao-Long Huang for useful discussions. This work was supported by grants from the National Basic Research Program of China ( 973 Program, 2007CB411600), the