Evolution of Gene Expression in Human and Chimpanzee Brains

Naoki Osada, National Institute of Biomedical Innovation, Ibaraki, Osaka, Japan
Sugano Sumio, University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan
Yutaka Suzuki, University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan

Published online: March 2008

DOI: 10.1002/9780470015902.a0020748

The deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) microarray technique enables us to gauge the difference in gene expression level between human and chimpanzee brains at a genome-wide level. Several studies have shown that (1) gene expression is more conservative in the brain than in other tissues, (2) the divergence rate of gene expression in the brain is higher in the lineage of humans than in the chimpanzees and (3) more genes are up-regulated in human brains.

Keywords: evolution; primates; DNA microarray; gene expression; brain

Figure 1. Phylogenetic tree of the primates of the group Catarrhini. The closest relatives of humans are chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and bonobos (Pan paniscus); however, some parts of the human genome are more closely related to the gorilla (Gorilla gorilla) genome.
Figure 2. Divergence of gene expression between humans and chimpanzees in five tissues. Genes specifically expressed in the target tissues were analysed. The height of the bars represents the average amount of expression divergence over all possible pairwise comparisons. Error bars show 95% confidence intervals estimated by bootstrap resampling. Data are from Khaitovich et al. (2005).
Figure 3. The number of genes expressed differentially between the lineages of the humans (open bars, H) and chimpanzees (solid bars, C) in the brains and livers (P0.05). Orangutans were used as the outgroup. The data was obtained by Enard et al. (2002) and reanalysed by Gu and Gu (2003).
Figure 4. Human-specific hub genes identified by module visualization. (a) Three hundred pairs of genes with the greatest connectivity in the human cortex are represented by thin lines. Genes with expression levels that are negatively correlated are connected by thick lines. (b) Connections from (a) that are specific to the human cortex. Reproduced from Oldham et al. (2006) by permission of National Academy of Sciences, USA.
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 Further Reading
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    Uddin M, Wildman DE, Liu G et al. (2004) Sister grouping of chimpanzees and humans as revealed by genome-wide phylogenetic analysis of brain gene expression profiles. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA 101: 2957–2962.

Related Sub-Topics:

Nervous System Development | Reconstruction of Phylogeny | Evolutionary Genomics | Molecular Evolution | Human Evolution | Techniques and Tools in Molecular Biology | Evolution of Coding and Functional Modules
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Article Title: Evolution of Gene Expression in Human and Chimpanzee Brains
 
How to Cite close
Osada, Naoki, Sumio, Sugano, and Suzuki, Yutaka(Mar 2008) Evolution of Gene Expression in Human and Chimpanzee Brains. In: eLS. John Wiley & Sons Ltd, Chichester. http://www.els.net [doi: 10.1002/9780470015902.a0020748]