Ancient transposable elements transformed the uterine regulatory landscape and transcriptome during the evolution of mammalian pregnancy

A major challenge in biology is to determine how evolutionarily novel characters originate, however, mechanistic explanations for the origin of novelties are almost completely unknown. The evolution of mammalian pregnancy is an excellent system in which to study the origin of novelties because extant mammals preserve major stages in the transition from egg-laying to live-birth. To determine the molecular bases of this transition we characterized the pregnant/gravid uterine transcriptome from tetrapods, including species in the three major mammalian lineages, and used ancestral transcriptome reconstruction to trace the evolutionary history of uterine gene expression. We show that thousands of genes evolved endometrial expression during the origins of mammalian pregnancy, including numerous genes that mediate maternal-fetal communication and immunotolerance.Furthermore we show that thousands of regulatory elements active in decidualized human endometrial stromal cells are derived from ancient mammalian transposable elements which provided binding sites for transcription factors that mediate decidualization and endometrial cell-type identity. Our results indicate that one of the defining mammalian novelties evolved via domestication of ancient mammalian transposable elements into hormone-responsive regulatory elements throughout the genome. Overall design: Examination of histone modification and DNAse hypersensitivity in decidualized dESC