Conserved Non-Coding Sequence

Conserved noncoding sequence/CNS. Conservation of genomic sequence that does not encode for protein. When detected, CNSs indicate that that genomic region has function related to its primary sequence. CNSs are often operationally (or methodologically) defined by the sequence alignment algorithms used for their detection and a cutoff imposed on the percent of sequence identity and length. CNSs have been extensively characterized in vertebrate and plant lineages. Vertebrate CNSs have been defined as >= 100bp long with >70% sequence identity; plant CNSs have been dfined as >=15bp long with a blast e-value <= to that of a 15/15bp exact match. However, other operational definitions will work as well using different alignment algorithms.