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Defining the role of essential genes in human disease.

PloS one | 2011

A greater understanding of the causes of human disease can come from identifying characteristics that are specific to disease genes. However, a full understanding of the contribution of essential genes to human disease is lacking, due to the premise that these genes tend to cause developmental abnormalities rather than adult disease. We tested the hypothesis that human orthologs of mouse essential genes are associated with a variety of human diseases, rather than only those related to miscarriage and birth defects. We segregated human disease genes according to whether the knockout phenotype of their mouse ortholog was lethal or viable, defining those with orthologs producing lethal knockouts as essential disease genes. We show that the human orthologs of mouse essential genes are associated with a wide spectrum of diseases affecting diverse physiological systems. Notably, human disease genes with essential mouse orthologs are over-represented among disease genes associated with cancer, suggesting links between adult cellular abnormalities and developmental functions. The proteins encoded by essential genes are highly connected in protein-protein interaction networks, which we find correlates with an over-representation of nuclear proteins amongst essential disease genes. Disease genes associated with essential orthologs also are more likely than those with non-essential orthologs to contribute to disease through an autosomal dominant inheritance pattern, suggesting that these diseases may actually result from semi-dominant mutant alleles. Overall, we have described attributes found in disease genes according to the essentiality status of their mouse orthologs. These findings demonstrate that disease genes do occupy highly connected positions in protein-protein interaction networks, and that due to the complexity of disease-associated alleles, essential genes cannot be ignored as candidates for causing diverse human diseases.

Pubmed ID: 22096564 RIS Download

Associated grants

  • Agency: Wellcome Trust, United Kingdom

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This is a list of tools and resources that we have found mentioned in this publication.


Gene Ontology (tool)

RRID:SCR_002811

Computable knowledge regarding functions of genes and gene products. GO resources include biomedical ontologies that cover molecular domains of all life forms as well as extensive compilations of gene product annotations to these ontologies that provide largely species-neutral, comprehensive statements about what gene products do. Used to standardize representation of gene and gene product attributes across species and databases.

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BIND (tool)

RRID:SCR_003576

THIS RESOURCE IS NO LONGER IN SERVICE. Documented on March 17, 2022. Designed to capture protein function, defined at molecular level as set of other molecules with which protein interacts or reacts along with molecular outcome. Archives biomolecular interaction, complex and pathway information. A web-based system is available to query, view and submit records. BIND continues to grow with the addition of individual submissions as well as interaction data from the PDB and a number of large-scale interaction and complex mapping experiments using yeast two hybrid, mass spectrometry, genetic interactions and phage display.

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MeSH (tool)

RRID:SCR_004750

A controlled vocabulary thesaurus that consists of sets of terms naming descriptors in a hierarchical structure that permits searching at various levels of specificity. MeSH, in machine-readable form, is provided at no charge via electronic means. MeSH descriptors are arranged in both an alphabetic and a hierarchical structure. At the most general level of the hierarchical structure are very broad headings such as Anatomy or Mental Disorders. More specific headings are found at more narrow levels of the twelve-level hierarchy, such as Ankle and Conduct Disorder. There are 27,149 descriptors in 2014 MeSH. There are also over 218,000 entry terms that assist in finding the most appropriate MeSH Heading, for example, Vitamin C is an entry term to Ascorbic Acid. In addition to these headings, there are more than 219,000 headings called Supplementary Concept Records (formerly Supplementary Chemical Records) within a separate thesaurus. The MeSH thesaurus is used by NLM for indexing articles from 5,400 of the world''''s leading biomedical journals for the MEDLINE/PubMED database. It is also used for the NLM-produced database that includes cataloging of books, documents, and audiovisuals acquired by the Library. Each bibliographic reference is associated with a set of MeSH terms that describe the content of the item. Similarly, search queries use MeSH vocabulary to find items on a desired topic.

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NCBI BLAST (tool)

RRID:SCR_004870

Web search tool to find regions of similarity between biological sequences. Program compares nucleotide or protein sequences to sequence databases and calculates statistical significance. Used for identifying homologous sequences.

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Sanger Mouse Resources Portal (tool)

RRID:SCR_006239

Database of mouse research resources at Sanger: BACs, targeting vectors, targeted ES cells, mutant mouse lines, and phenotypic data generated from the Institute''''s primary screen. The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute generates, characterizes, and uses a variety of reagents for mouse genetics research. It also aims to facilitate the distribution of these resources to the external scientific community. Here, you will find unified access to the different resources available from the Institute or its collaborators. The resources include: 129S7 and C57BL6/J bacterial artificial chromosomes (BACs), MICER gene targeting vectors, knock-out first conditional-ready gene targeting vectors, embryonic stem (ES) cells with gene targeted mutations or with retroviral gene trap insertions, mutant mouse lines, and phenotypic data generated from the Institute''''s primary screen.

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HPRD - Human Protein Reference Database (tool)

RRID:SCR_007027

Database that represents a centralized platform to visually depict and integrate information pertaining to domain architecture, post-translational modifications, interaction networks and disease association for each protein in the human proteome. All the information in HPRD has been manually extracted from the literature by expert biologists who read, interpret and analyze the published data.

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Mouse Genome Database (tool)

RRID:SCR_012953

Community model organism database for laboratory mouse and authoritative source for phenotype and functional annotations of mouse genes. MGD includes complete catalog of mouse genes and genome features with integrated access to genetic, genomic and phenotypic information, all serving to further the use of the mouse as a model system for studying human biology and disease. MGD is a major component of the Mouse Genome Informatics.Contains standardized descriptions of mouse phenotypes, associations between mouse models and human genetic diseases, extensive integration of DNA and protein sequence data, normalized representation of genome and genome variant information. Data are obtained and integrated via manual curation of the biomedical literature, direct contributions from individual investigators and downloads from major informatics resource centers. MGD collaborates with the bioinformatics community on the development and use of biomedical ontologies such as the Gene Ontology (GO) and the Mammalian Phenotype (MP) Ontology.

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GQuery (tool)

RRID:SCR_001455

Search engine for the National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health. It contains databases such as PubMed, EST, and BioSystems.

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Entrez Gene (tool)

RRID:SCR_002473

Database for genomes that have been completely sequenced, have active research community to contribute gene-specific information, or that are scheduled for intense sequence analysis. Includes nomenclature, map location, gene products and their attributes, markers, phenotypes, and links to citations, sequences, variation details, maps, expression, homologs, protein domains and external databases. All entries follow NCBI's format for data collections. Content of Entrez Gene represents result of curation and automated integration of data from NCBI's Reference Sequence project (RefSeq), from collaborating model organism databases, and from many other databases available from NCBI. Records are assigned unique, stable and tracked integers as identifiers. Content is updated as new information becomes available.

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