chr7 · 7q11.22 · 248 nt · 2006

HAR31

AUTS2

What it is

HAR31 is one of the human-accelerated tiles at AUTS2. Alone it is a short noncoding strip; together with its neighbors it is a rewritten regulatory neighborhood for a social-cognition gene.

Why it matters

Named HAR at AUTS2.

Operator load

• 01 · ΔE

  Enhancer activity

  These stretches of DNA do not code for proteins. They act as volume knobs — turning nearby brain-development genes up or down at the right moment.

• 03 · T

  Three-dimensional rewiring

  The genome folds in 3D. Human-specific changes can re-route which switches sit next to which genes, even if the letters look similar in a straight line.

Pollard catalog · Oksenberg & Ahituv 2013