Transcriptomic insights into human brain evolution: acceleration, neutrality, heterochrony

Date

2014-12-01

Author

Somel, Mehmet
Liu, Xiling

Metadata

Show full item record

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Item Usage Stats

137
views

0
downloads

Primate brain transcriptome comparisons within the last 12 years have yielded interesting but contradictory observations on how the transcriptome evolves, and its adaptive role in human cognitive evolution. Since the human-chimpanzee common ancestor, the human prefrontal cortex transcriptome seems to have evolved more than that of the chimpanzee. But at the same time, most expression differences among species, especially those observed in adults, appear as consequences of neutral evolution at cis-regulatory sites. Adaptive expression changes in the human brain may be rare events involving timing shifts, or heterochrony, in specific neurodevelopmental processes. Disentangling adaptive and neutral expression changes, and associating these with human-specific features of the brain require improved methods, comparisons across more species, and further work on comparative development.

Subject Keywords

Developmental Biology, Genetics

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/48757

Journal

CURRENT OPINION IN GENETICS & DEVELOPMENT

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gde.2014.09.001

Collections

Department of Biology, Article

Suggestions

OpenMETU
Core

Evolution of Primate Gene Expression: Drift and Corrective Sweeps? Chaix, R.; Somel, Mehmet; Kreil, D. P.; Khaitovich, P.; Lunter, G. A. (Genetics Society of America, 2008-11-01) Changes in gene expression play an important: role in species' evolution. Earlier studies uncovered evidence that the effect of mutations on expression levels within the primate order is skewed, with many small downregulations balanced by fewer but larger upregulations. In addition, brain-expressed genes appeared to show an increased rate of evolution on the branch leading to human. However, the lack of a mathematical model adequately describing the evolution of gene expression precluded the rigorous establ...
Evolution of Neuronal and Endothelial Transcriptomes in Primates Giger, Thomas; Khaitovich, Philipp; Somel, Mehmet; Lorenc, Anna; Lizano, Esther; Harris, Laura W.; Ryan, Margaret M.; Lan, Martin; Wayland, Matthew T.; Bahn, Sabine; Paeaebo, Svante (Oxford University Press (OUP), 2010-01-01) The study of gene expression evolution in vertebrates has hitherto focused on the analysis of transcriptomes in tissues of different species. However, because a tissue is made up of different cell types, and cell types differ with respect to their transcriptomes, the analysis of tissues offers a composite picture of transcriptome evolution. The isolation of individual cells from tissue sections opens up the opportunity to study gene expression evolution at the cell type level. We have stained neurons and en...
STATISTICAL PREDICTION OF THE EXTINCTION TIME OF EXTINCT MAMMALIAN SPECIES IN ANATOLIA Ekşi, Elçin; Kalaylıoğlu Akyıldız, Zeynep Işıl; Department of Archaeometry (2023-2-02) Extinction and origination of species are fundamental to the process of evolution, a dynamic force that shapes the history of life. These processes are studied with different motivations in both paleontology and ecology. In some cases, obtaining sufficient population data for the studied species is impossible. For example, fossils of an extinct species or data from an endangered and rare species offer limited analysis. In such cases, it is possible to predict the extinction time of a species by analyzing th...
Metabolic changes in schizophrenia and human brain evolution Khaitovich, Philipp; Lockstone, Helen E.; Wayland, Matthew T.; Tsang, Tsz M.; Jayatilaka, Samantha D.; Guo, Arfu J.; Zhou, Jie; Somel, Mehmet; Harris, Laura W.; Holmes, Elaine; Paeaebo, Svante; Bahn, Sabine (2008-01-01) Background: Despite decades of research, the molecular changes responsible for the evolution of human cognitive abilities remain unknown. Comparative evolutionary studies provide detailed information about DNA sequence and mRNA expression differences between humans and other primates but, in the absence of other information, it has proved very difficult to identify molecular pathways relevant to human cognition.
Evaluating the effects of rescaling parameters in large-scale genomic simulations Kıratlı, Ozan; Birand Özsoy, Ayşegül Ceren; Department of Biology (2016) Computer simulations are widely used in many subdisciplines of biological sciences, which evolutionary biology. Large-scale genomic simulations, where several kb (kilo base) to several Mb (megabase) genomes are modeled, are being increasingly used. These simulations require high computing power. There are some methods proposed in the literature to decrease the time and memory demand of these simulations. This study is concentrated on one of those methods, where both the number of generation, and the number ...

Citation Formats

M. Somel and X. Liu, “Transcriptomic insights into human brain evolution: acceleration, neutrality, heterochrony,” CURRENT OPINION IN GENETICS & DEVELOPMENT, pp. 110–119, 2014, Accessed: 00, 2020. [Online]. Available: https://hdl.handle.net/11511/48757.