An Abundance of Bidirectional Promoters in the Human Genome

The alignment of full-length human cDNA sequences to the finished sequence of the human genome provides a unique opportunity to study the distribution of genes throughout the genome. By analyzing the distances between 23,752 genes, we identified a class of divergently transcribed gene pairs, representing more than 10% of the genes in the genome, whose transcription start sites are separated by less than 1000 base pairs. Although this bidirectional arrangement has been previously described in humans and other species, the prevalence of bidirectional gene pairs in the human genome is striking, and the mechanisms of regulation of all but a few bidirectional genes are unknown. Our work shows that the transcripts…