ArticleBMC evolutionary biology2010
Human functional genetic studies are biased against the medically most relevant primate-specific genes.
Article in BMC evolutionary biology, 2010. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed.
- Early Origin of the Human Seminal Plasma Proteome During Vertebrate Evolution.Genome biology and evolution · 2026Article
- Comparative single-nucleus transcriptomics reveals asymmetric evolution of the Drosophila male and female germlines.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- Gene age shapes functional and evolutionary properties of theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Dichotomous transcriptome divergence at the cell-type level between thebioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Stratifying TAD boundaries pinpoints focal genomic regions of regulation, damage, and repair.Briefings in bioinformatics · 2024Article
- Pan-cancer surveys indicate cell cycle-related roles of primate-specific genes in tumors and embryonic cerebrum.Genome biology · 2022Article
- Gene ORGANizer: linking genes to the organs they affect.Nucleic acids research · 2017Article
- Emergence and Evolution of Hominidae-Specific Coding and Noncoding Genomic Sequences.Genome biology and evolution · 2016Article
- Increased Transcript Complexity in Genes Associated with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease.PloS one · 2015Article
- Three independent determinants of protein evolutionary rate.Journal of molecular evolution · 2013Review
- Human monogenic disease genes have frequently functionally redundant paralogs.PLoS computational biology · 2013Article
- Article
- Human sensory neuron-specific Mas-related G protein-coupled receptors-X1 sensitize and directly activate transient receptor potential cation channel V1 via distinct signaling pathways.The Journal of biological chemistry · 2012Article
- Younger genes are less likely to be essential than older genes, and duplicates are less likely to be essential than singletons of the same age.Molecular biology and evolution · 2012Article
- Article
- Exploring the potential relevance of human-specific genes to complex disease.Human genomics · 2011Review
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundMany functional, structural and evolutionary features of human genes have been observed to correlate with expression breadth and/or gene age. Here, we systematically explore these correlations.
resultsGene age and expression breadth are strongly correlated, but contribute independently to the variation of functional, structural and evolutionary features, even when we take account of variation in mRNA expression level. Human genes without orthologs in distant species ('young' genes) tend to be tissue-specific in their expression. As computational inference of gene function often relies on the existence of homologs in other species, and experimental characterization is facilitated by broad and high expression, young, tissue-specific human genes are often the least characterized. At the same time, young genes are most likely to be medically relevant.
conclusionsOur results indicate that functional characterization of human genes is biased against young, tissue-specific genes that are mostly medically relevant. The biases should not be taken lightly because they may pose serious obstacles to our understanding of the molecular basis of human diseases. Future studies should thus be designed to specifically explore the properties of primate-specific genes.
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