Dissecting functional regulatory convergence over 160 million years of therian evolution.

Convergent regulatory regions in thylacine and wolf show limited evidence of shared divergence related to craniofacial traits.

• Why it matters: Understanding whether similar traits arise from shared regulatory changes can reveal how predictable evolution is, especially over long divergence times.
• What they did: Using a massively parallel reporter assay, the study tested the regulatory activity of conserved craniofacial enhancers across six taxa, including outgroups and ancestral reconstructions, focusing on TWARs with sequence acceleration.
• The result: The research found conserved regulatory activity patterns across taxa, with only limited convergent divergence near the gene LMO4, indicating shared gene regulatory potential is not common in these regions.