Diverse Gene Regulatory Mechanisms Alter Rattlesnake Venom Gene Expression at Fine Evolutionary Scales.

Understanding and predicting the relationships between genotype and phenotype is often challenging, largely due to the complex nature of eukaryotic gene regulation. A step towards this goal is to map how phenotypic diversity evolves through genomic changes that modify gene regulatory interactions. Using the Prairie Rattlesnake (Crotalus viridis) and related species, we integrate mRNA-seq, proteomic, ATAC-seq and whole-genome resequencing data to understand how specific evolutionary modifications to gene regulatory network components produce differences in venom gene expression.