Evolutionary conservation has been an accurate predictor of functional elements across the first decade of metazoan genomics. More recently, there has been a move to define functional elements instead from biochemical annotations. Evolutionary methods are, however, more comprehensive than biochemical approaches can be and can assess quantitatively, especially for subtle effects, how biologically important--how injurious after mutation--different types of elements are. Evolutionary methods are thus critical for understanding the large fraction (up to 10%) of the human genome that does not encode proteins and yet might convey function. These methods can also capture the ephemeral nature of much noncoding functional sequence, with large numbers of functional elements having been gained and lost rapidly along each mammalian lineage. Here, we review how different strengths of purifying selection have impacted on protein-coding and non-protein-coding loci and on transcription factor binding sites in mammalian and fruit fly genomes.

中文翻译：

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除了进化论，基因组中的任何基因都没有意义。

在后生动物基因组学的第一个十年中，进化保守一直是功能元素的准确预测指标。最近，已经开始从生化注释中定义功能元素。然而，进化方法比生化方法更全面，并且可以定量评估，特别是对于微妙的影响，生物学上的重要性——突变后的伤害程度——不同类型的元素。因此，进化方法对于理解人类基因组中不编码蛋白质但可能传递功能的大部分（高达 10%）至关重要。这些方法还可以捕捉到许多非编码功能序列的短暂性质，在每个哺乳动物谱系中，大量的功能元件已经获得和迅速丢失。这里，