CiteULike is a free online bibliography manager. Register and you can start organising your references online.

Evolutionary rate and gene expression across different brain regions Export

Genome Biology, Vol. 9, No. 9. (2008), R142.

Citation Format

[Posts]

View FullText article


manduca's tags for this article

brain_region gene_expression

X Reviews [Write a review of this article]

X Find related articles from these CiteULike users

X Find related articles with these CiteULike tags

X Posting History

X Abstract

BACKGROUND:The evolutionary rate of a protein is a basic measure of evolution at the molecular level. Previous studies have shown that genes expressed in the brain have significantly lower evolutionary rates than those expressed in somatic tissues.RESULTS:We study the evolutionary rates of genes expressed in 21 different human brain regions. We find that genes highly expressed in the more recent cortical regions of the brain have lower evolutionary rates than genes highly expressed in subcortical regions. This may partially result from the observation that genes that are highly expressed in cortical regions tend to be highly expressed in subcortical regions, and thus their evolution faces a richer set of functional constraints. The frequency of mammal-specific and primate-specific genes is higher in the highly expressed gene sets of subcortical brain regions than in those of cortical brain regions. The basic inverse correlation between evolutionary rate and gene expression is significantly stronger in brain versus nonbrain tissues, and in cortical versus subcortical regions. Extending upon this cortical/subcortical trend, this inverse correlation is generally more marked for tissues that are located higher along the cranial vertical axis during development, giving rise to the possibility that these tissues are also more evolutionarily recent.CONCLUSIONS:We find that cortically expressed genes are more conserved than subcortical ones, and that gene expression levels exert stronger constraints on sequence evolution in cortical versus subcortical regions. Taken together, these findings suggest that cortically expressed genes are under stronger selective pressure than subcortically expressed genes.


X BibTeX record

X RIS record


Privacy Statement | Terms & Conditions
CiteULike organises scholarly (or academic) papers or literature and provides bibliographic (which means it makes bibliographies) for universities and higher education establishments. It helps undergraduates and postgraduates. People studying for PhDs or in postdoctoral (postdoc) positions. The service is similar in scope to EndNote or RefWorks or any other reference manager like BibTeX, but it is a social bookmarking service for scientists and humanities researchers.