The exploration of functional divergence between human and macaque brains based on gene networks

Abstract

Although human and macaque share a lot of genes, their brains have different functions. In this study, we compare human and macaque brains from a systematic perspective by assuming that the difference between human and macaque brains is due to the difference of molecular circuits underlying brains instead of certain individual genes. Specially, we construct a gene interaction network for each brain region and investigate the difference between human and macaque brains based on those region-specific gene networks. We found that the genes in human brain networks tend to interact with each other compared with those of macaque brain networks. In addition, the human genes are more likely to form functional modules compared against macaque genes. Moreover, the human specific genes tend to interact with hub genes, while both the hub genes and human specific genes are enriched in brain functions. These findings can help better understand the functional divergence between human and macaque brains.