Genome-scale analysis of positional clustering of mouse testis-specific genes.
BACKGROUND
Genes are not randomly distributed on a chromosome as they were thought even after removal of tandem repeats. The positional clustering of co-expressed genes is known in prokaryotes and recently reported in several eukaryotic organisms such as Caenorhabditis elegans, Drosophila melanogaster, and Homo sapiens. In order to further investigate the mode of tissue-specific gene clustering in higher eukaryotes, we have performed a genome-scale analysis of positional clustering of the mouse testis-specific genes.


RESULTS
Our computational analysis shows that a large proportion of testis-specific genes are clustered in groups of 2 to 5 genes in the mouse genome. The number of clusters is much higher than expected by chance even after removal of tandem repeats.


CONCLUSIONS
Our result suggests that testis-specific genes tend to cluster on the mouse chromosomes. This provides another piece of evidence for the hypothesis that clusters of tissue-specific genes do exist.
Li
Quan
Q
Institute for Infocomm Research, Heng Mui Keng Terrace 21, Singapore. g0201731@nus.edu.sg
Lee
Bernett T K
BT
Zhang
Louxin
L
D000818:Animals; D002874:Chromosome Mapping; D016000:Cluster Analysis; D019295:Computational Biology / Q000379:methods; D018076:DNA, Complementary / Q000378:metabolism; D030541:Databases, Genetic; D004331:Drosophila melanogaster; D020224:Expressed Sequence Tags; D020869:Gene Expression Profiling; D005786:Gene Expression Regulation; D016678:Genome; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D051379:Mice; D015233:Models, Statistical; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D005810:Multigene Family; D016366:Open Reading Frames; D017422:Sequence Analysis, DNA; D012984:Software; D013737:Testis / Q000378:metabolism*
D018076:DNA, Complementary