Are there mammalian promoters with distal enhancer functions?
Yes. Several studies have suggested that some promoters might have enhancer functions. By exploiting a high-throughput enhancer reporter assay, scientists have unraveled a set of mammalian promoters displaying enhancer activity. These promoters have distinct genomic and epigenomic features and frequently interact with other gene promoters. Extensive CRISPR-Cas9 genomic manipulation demonstrated the involvement of these promoters in the cis regulation of expression of distal genes in their natural loci.