The human brain and human cognitive abilities are strikingly different from those of other great apes despite relatively modest genome sequence divergence. However, little is presently known about the interspecies divergence in gene structure and transcription that might contribute to these phenotypic differences. To date, most comparative studies of gene structure in the brain have examined humans, chimpanzees, and macaque monkeys. To add to this body of knowledge, we analyze here the brain transcriptome of the western lowland gorilla (Gorilla gorilla gorilla), an African great ape species that is phylogenetically closely related to humans, but with a brain that is approximately one-third the size. Manual transcriptome curation from a sample of the planum temporale region of the neocortex revealed 12 protein-coding genes and one noncoding-RNA gene with exons in the gorilla unmatched by public transcriptome data from the orthologous human loci. These interspecies gene structure differences accounted for a total of 134 amino acids in proteins found in the gorilla that were absent from protein products of the orthologous human genes. Proteins varying in structure between human and gorilla were involved in immunity and energy metabolism, suggesting their relevance to phenotypic differences. This gorilla neocortical transcriptome comprises an empirical, not homology- or prediction-driven, resource for orthologous gene comparisons between human and gorilla. These findings provide a unique repository of the sequences and structures of thousands of genes transcribed in the gorilla brain, pointing to candidate genes that may contribute to the traits distinguishing humans from other closely related great apes.
Pubmed ID: 26132897 RIS Download
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Portal to interactively visualize genomic data. Provides reference sequences and working draft assemblies for collection of genomes and access to ENCODE and Neanderthal projects. Includes collection of vertebrate and model organism assemblies and annotations, along with suite of tools for viewing, analyzing and downloading data.
View all literature mentionsSeattle based independent, nonprofit medical research organization dedicated to accelerating the understanding of how human brain works. Provides free data and tools to researchers and educators and variety of unique online public resources for exploring the nervous system. Integrates gene expression data and neuroanatomy, along with data search and viewing tools, these resources are openly accessible via the Allen Brain Atlas data portal. Provides Allen Mouse Brain, Allen Spinal Cord Atlas, Allen Developing Mouse Brain Atlas, Allen Human Brain Atlas,Allen Mouse Brain Connectivity Atlas, Allen Cell Type Database, The Ivy Glioblastoma Atlas Project (Ivy GAP), The BrainSpan Atlas of the Developing Human Brain.
View all literature mentionsSoftware designed to quickly find sequences of 95% and greater similarity of length 25 bases or more.
View all literature mentionsSoftware tool that screens DNA sequences for interspersed repeats and low complexity DNA sequences. The output of the program is a detailed annotation of the repeats that are present in the query sequence as well as a modified version of the query sequence in which all the annotated repeats have been masked (default: replaced by Ns). Currently over 56% of human genomic sequence is identified and masked by the program. Sequence comparisons in RepeatMasker are performed by one of several popular search engines including nhmmer, cross_match, ABBlast/WUBlast, RMBlast and Decypher. RepeatMasker makes use of curated libraries of repeats and currently supports Dfam ( profile HMM library ) and RepBase ( consensus sequence library ).
View all literature mentionsSoftware tool for fast and high throughput alignment of shotgun cDNA sequencing reads generated by transcriptomics technologies. Fast splice junction mapper for RNA-Seq reads. Aligns RNA-Seq reads to mammalian-sized genomes using ultra high-throughput short read aligner Bowtie, and then analyzes mapping results to identify splice junctions between exons.TopHat2 is accurate alignment of transcriptomes in presence of insertions, deletions and gene fusions.
View all literature mentionsSoftware for scoring protein sequence conservation using the Jensen-Shannon divergence. It can be used to predict catalytic sites and residues near bound ligands.
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