Question: Do Conserved noncoding elements act as enhancers?

Context:
The aCNEs are rich in tissue-specific enhancers
Transgenic zebrafish assay of some human CNE enhancers that have been lost in teleosts
Conserved noncoding elements (CNEs) in vertebrate genomes often act as developmental enhancers,
In all four cases where the zebra fish and human CNE display a similar expression pattern in zebra fish, the human CNE also displays a similar expression pattern in mouse. This suggests that the endogenous enhancer activity of ∼30% of human CNEs can be determined from experiments in zebra fish
If these ancient CNEs are indeed enhancers directing tissue-specific expression of Hox genes, divergence of their sequences in vertebrate lineages might have led to altered expression patterns and presumably the functions of their associated Hox genes.
Comparisons of noncoding sequences of the elephant shark and human Hox clusters have identified a large number of conserved noncoding elements (CNEs), which represent putative cis-regulatory elements that may be involved in the regulation of Hox genes.
Animal genomes possess highly conserved cis-regulatory sequences that are often found near genes that regulate transcription and development.
We test 42 of our PCNEs in transgenic zebrafish assays--including examples from vertebrates and amphioxus--and find that the majority are functional enhancers.
The genomes of vertebrates, flies, and nematodes contain highly conserved noncoding elements (CNEs). CNEs cluster around genes that regulate development, and where tested, they can act as transcriptional enhancers.
, we identified 17 highly conserved noncoding elements, 9 of which revealed specific acetylation marks in chromatin-immunoprecipitation and microarray (ChIP-chip) assays performed across 250 kb of the Lmo2 locus in 11 cell types covering different stages of hematopoietic differentiation. All candidate regulatory regions were tested in transgenic mice. An extended LMO2 proximal promoter fragment displayed strong endothelial activity, while the distal promoter showed weak forebrain activity. Eight of the 15 distal candidate elements functioned as enhancers,
Pan-vertebrate developmental cis-regulatory elements are discernible as highly conserved noncoding elements (HCNEs) and are often dispersed over large areas around the pleiotropic genes whose expression they control.
HCNEs of both human and zebrafish function as specific developmental enhancers in zebrafish.
several transcriptional enhancers are conserved between amphioxus and vertebrates--a very wide phylogenetic distance.
We recently described GRBs in vertebrates, where most HCNEs function as enhancers
Besides developmental regulators that are likely targets of HCNE enhancers
We identify and characterize highly conserved noncoding elements flanking the TNF gene, which undergo activation-dependent intrachromosomal interactions. These elements, hypersensitive site (HSS)-9 and HSS+3 (9 kb upstream and 3 kb downstream of the TNF gene, respectively), contain DNase I hypersensitive sites in naive, T helper 1, and T helper 2 primary T cells. Both HSS-9 and HSS+3 inducibly associate with acetylated histones, indicative of chromatin remodeling, bind the transcription factor nuclear factor of activated T cells (NFAT)p in vitro and in vivo, and function as enhancers
We used the sequence signatures identified by this approach to successfully assign tissue-specific predictions to approximately 328,000 human-mouse conserved noncoding elements in the human genome. By overlapping these genome-wide predictions with a data set of enhancers validated in vivo, in transgenic mice, we were able to confirm our results with a 28% sensitivity and 50% precision.
Fish-mammal genomic comparisons have proved powerful in identifying conserved noncoding elements likely to be cis-regulatory in nature, and the majority of those tested in vivo have been shown to act as tissue-specific enhancers associated with genes involved in transcriptional regulation of development.
uncovered two anciently conserved noncoding sequences (CNS) upstream of COUP-TFII (CNS-62kb and CNS-66kb). Testing these two elements using reporter constructs in liver cells (HepG2) revealed that CNS-66kb, but not CNS-62kb, yielded robust in vitro enhancer activity.

Answer: An important percentage of noncoding elements conserved across distant species shows enhancer activity and other forms of regulatory functionality.
Exact answer: yes