Authors: Ping Jin Sheng Qin Xi Chen Yumei Song Jesse LiLing Xiaofeng Xu Fei Ma
Publish Date: 2013/01/22
Volume: 140, Issue: 10-12, Pages: 513-523
Abstract
The influence of transposable elements TEs on genome evolution has been widely studied However it remains unclear whether TE insertions also impact on evolutionary rate of human genes In this study we have compared the differences in TEs and evolutionary rates between human tissuespecific genes Our results showed that various functional categories of human tissuespecific genes contained different TE numbers and divergent values of Ka/Ks with human nucleic acid binding transcription factor activity genes having the fewest TE density and Ka/Ks value Interestingly we also found that human tissuespecific genes with TEs have also undergone faster evolution than those without TEs Therefore TEs have significant impact on the evolutionary rates of human tissuespecific genes Furthermore local genomic properties such as gene length GC content and recombination rate may reflect a true transpositional bias for the particular TEs Our results may provide important insights for further elucidating the evolution of human tissuespecific genesWe are grateful to the two reviewers for their appropriate and constructive suggestions and Alan K Chang Dalian University of Technology for critically revising the manuscriptas well as to our colleagues for their suggestions and criticisms on the manuscript This work has been jointly supported by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China No 30970348 the Project of New Century Excellent Talents in Universities No NCET070405 and the Project Funded by the Priority Academic Program Development of Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions
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