A comparative analysis of liver transcriptome suggests divergent liver function among human, mouse and rat.
The human liver plays a vital role in meeting the body's metabolic needs and maintaining homeostasis. To address the molecular mechanisms of liver function, we integrated multiple gene expression datasets from microarray, MPSS, SAGE and EST platforms to generate a transcriptome atlas of the normal human liver. Our results show that 17396 genes are expressed in the human liver. 238 genes were identified as liver enrichment genes, involved in the functions of immune response and metabolic processes, from the MPSS and EST datasets. A comparative analysis of liver transcriptomes was performed in humans, mice and rats with microarray datasets shows that the expression profile of homologous genes remains significantly different between mouse/rat and human, suggesting a functional variance and regulation bias of genes expressed in the livers. The integrated liver transcriptome data should provide a valuable resource for the in-depth understanding of human liver biology and liver disease.
Yu
Yao
Y
Bioinformatics Center, Key Lab of Systems Biology, Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 200031, China.
Ping
Jie
J
Chen
Hui
H
Jiao
Longxian
L
Zheng
Siyuan
S
Han
Ze-Guang
ZG
Hao
Pei
P
Huang
Jian
J
D000328:Adult; D000818:Animals; D019295:Computational Biology / Q000379:methods; D030541:Databases, Genetic; D020224:Expressed Sequence Tags; D015870:Gene Expression; D020869:Gene Expression Profiling / Q000379:methods*; D006801:Humans; D008099:Liver / Q000378:metabolism*; D051379:Mice; D020411:Oligonucleotide Array Sequence Analysis; D051381:Rats; D020133:Reverse Transcriptase Polymerase Chain Reaction; D013045:Species Specificity