Abstract
Human organ, as the basic structural and functional unit in human body, is made of a large community of different cell types that organically bound together. Each organ usually exerts highly specified physiological function; while several related organs work smartly together to perform complicated body functions. In this study, we present a computational effort to understand the roles of genes in building functional connection between organs. More specifically, we mined multiple transcriptome datasets sampled from 36 human organs and tissues, and quantitatively identified 3,149 genes whose expressions showed consensus modularly patterns: specific to one organ/tissue, selectively expressed in several functionally related tissues and ubiquitously expressed. These pattern genes imply intrinsic connections between organs. According to the expression abundance of the 766 selective genes, we consistently cluster the 36 human organs/tissues into seven functional groups: adipose & gland, brain, muscle, immune, metabolism, mucoid and nerve conduction. The organs and tissues in each group either work together to form organ systems or coordinate to perform particular body functions. The particular roles of specific genes and selective genes suggest that they could not only be used to mechanistically explore organ functions, but also be designed for selective biomarkers and therapeutic targets.
Highlights
Human organ, as the basic structural and functional unit in human body, is made of a large community of different cell types that organically bound together
We present a computational effort to understand the roles of genes in building functional connection between organs
The exact functions that an organ performs are subject to its constituted cells, specialized during development and are accompanied with a bundle of cellular processes including intracellular interactions, cell-cell contacts, and extracellular matrix (ECM) modeling mediated by grow factors and hormones[1]
Summary
Yangmei Qin1,*, Jianbo Pan2,*, Meichun Cai[1], Lixia Yao3 & Zhiliang Ji1,2 received: 06 January 2016 accepted: 03 May 2016 Published: 26 May 2016. The tissue-specific or selective genes have been linked to different biomedical aspects of transcriptional regulation[5,6], epigenetic modification[7] differentiation[8], pathogenesis[9,10], biomarker design[11] and evolution[12] These efforts reveal limited characteristics of tissue and organ differentiation due to small data size or lack of rigorous quantitative analysis. Few of these studies have investigated the molecular mechanisms underlying organ crosstalk, which helps assembling different organs into organ system to perform complicated body functions. We want to use these pattern genes to heuristically answer questions like what decides organ-specific functions? What mediates the functional connection between organs? And how do organs work together to realize body functions?
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