Human areal expression of most genes is governed by regionalization
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1
Bar Ilan university, Brain Science, Israel
The human brain is organized in multiple anatomical substructures, whose morphology and circuitry are believed to allow each substructure to carry out their distinct function. While the physiological and histological differences and similarities between structures have been intensively studied, the molecular profiles giving rise to those differences are far from being understood. Specifically, it is not known which principles govern the expression patterns of genes across the adult brain and what determines their spatial organization. Recent high-resolution genome-wide transcriptome profiling studies allow addressing these questions.
Here we study the relation between regional expression patterns of individual genes and the developmental origin of each region. We analyzed two genome-wide mRNA expression datasets from post-mortem adult human brain, with a total of 26 subjects and 4193 samples. For each gene, we computed an index that measures how strongly its expression pattern agrees with the brain-region developmental ontology.
We find that 94% of human genes exhibit a regional expression pattern that agrees with the known brain-region ontology. This effect is particularly strong in neuron-specific genes and is also present in astrocytes- and oligodentrocytes-specific genes. Importantly, the same effect is found in many genes that are not cell-type specific, including housekeeping genes, and genes involved in embryonic development. This suggests that gene expression in the adult brain is regionally tuned, even for genes that participate in brain-wide functions, and for genes whose function is known in embryonic development but not in the adult brain. Furthermore, when performing the same analysis over subregions of the neocortex, 25% of genes show distinct expression patterns across different cortical areas. This suggests that cortical regions are far more heterogeneous in terms of their transcriptome than believed before.
Keywords:
Brain regionalization,
Cell-type Specific,
housekeeping genes,
brain ontology,
brain development ontology
Conference:
Neuroinformatics 2014, Leiden, Netherlands, 25 Aug - 27 Aug, 2014.
Presentation Type:
Poster, to be considered for oral presentation
Topic:
Genomics and genetics
Citation:
Kirsch
L and
Chechik
G
(2014). Human areal expression of most genes is governed by regionalization.
Front. Neuroinform.
Conference Abstract:
Neuroinformatics 2014.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fninf.2014.18.00091
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Received:
29 Apr 2014;
Published Online:
04 Jun 2014.
*
Correspondence:
Mr. Lior Kirsch, Bar Ilan university, Brain Science, Ramat Gan, Israel, lior.kirsch.biu@gmail.com