Conserved co-expression for candidate disease gene prioritization

Background: Genes that are co-expressed tend to be involved in the same biological process. However, co-expression is not a very reliable predictor of functional links between genes. The evolutionary conservation of co-expression between species can be used to predict protein function more reliably than co-expression in a single species. Here we examine whether coexpression across multiple species is also a better prioritizer of disease genes than is co-expression between human genes alone. Results: We use co-expression data from yeast (S. cerevisiae), nematode worm (C. elegans), fruit fly (D. melanogaster), mouse and human and find that the use of evolutionary conservation can indeed improve the predictive value of co-expression. The effect that genes causing the same disease have higher co-expression than do other genes from their associated disease loci, is significantly enhanced when co-expression data are combined across evolutionarily distant species. We also find that performan...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: BMCBI
• Authors: Martin Oti, Jeroen van Reeuwijk, Martijn A. Huynen, Han G. Brunner
• Keywords: BMCBI 2008, Co-expression Data, Disease Gene, Gene Co-expression