TY - JOUR T1 - Enhancer sharing promotes neighborhoods of transcriptional regulation across eukaryotes JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/061218 SP - 061218 AU - Porfirio Quintero-Cadena AU - Paul W. Sternberg Y1 - 2016/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/06/28/061218.abstract N2 - Enhancers physically interact with transcriptional promoters, looping over distances that can span multiple regulatory elements. Given that enhancer-promoter (EP) interactions generally occur via common protein complexes, it is unclear whether EP pairing is predominantly deterministic or proximity guided. Here we present cross-organismic evidence suggesting that most EP pairs are compatible, largely determined by physical proximity rather than specific interactions. By re-analyzing transcriptome datasets, we find that the transcription of gene neighbors is correlated over distances that scale with genome size. We experimentally show that non-specific EP interactions can explain such correlation, and that EP distance acts as a scaling factor for the transcriptional influence of an enhancer. We propose that enhancer sharing is commonplace among eukaryotes, and that EP distance is an important layer of information in gene regulation. ER -