Unless you’re having a picnic outdoors, worms and flies are about the furthest organisms imaginable from humans. That’s apparently not true in a genetic sense, as researchers from the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) have found multiple common genomic traits among all three, indicating a shared origin. The researchers say the findings offer valuable insights concerning human biology and disease.

“One way to describe and understand the human genome is through comparative genomics and studying model organisms,” said Mark Gerstein, Ph.D., Albert L. Williams Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, and the lead author on one of the papers. “The special thing about the worm and fly is that they are very distant from humans evolutionarily, so finding something conserved across all three – human, fly and worm – tells us it is a very ancient, fundamental process.”

The researchers used data from the ENCODE and modENCODE projects, both supported by the NHGRI. Among the traits studied include how gene expression patterns and regulatory proteins that help determine cell fate, as well as the similar ways all three species use protein packaging to compact DNA into the cell nucleus and to regulate genome function by controlling access to DNA. The goal of modENCODE, or the model organism ENCyclopedia Of DNA Elements, is to create a comprehensive catalog of functional elements in the fruit fly and roundworm genomes for use by the scientific community.

They were able to demonstrate the shared ways the three species turn genes on and off in a coordinated manner. They also found that in all three organisms, the gene expression levels for both protein-coding and non-protein-coding genes could be quantitatively predicted from chromatin features at the promoters of genes.

“Our findings open whole new worlds for understanding gene expression and how we think about the role of transcription,” said co-senior author Susan Celniker, Ph.D., Head, Department of Genome Dynamics, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California. “modENCODE has been transformative,” she added. “It has helped set the standard for the types of data that should be generated and catalogued.”