title: Transcriptomic insights into human brain evolution: acceleration, neutrality, heterochrony.
abstract: Primate brain transcriptome comparisons within the last 12 years have yielded interesting but contradictory observations on how the transcriptome evolves, and its adaptive role in human cognitive evolution. Since the human-chimpanzee common ancestor, the human prefrontal cortex transcriptome seems to have evolved more than that of the chimpanzee. But at the same time, most expression differences among species, especially those observed in adults, appear as consequences of neutral evolution at cis-regulatory sites. Adaptive expression changes in the human brain may be rare events involving timing shifts, or heterochrony, in specific neurodevelopmental processes. Disentangling adaptive and neutral expression changes, and associating these with human-specific features of the brain require improved methods, comparisons across more species, and further work on comparative development.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biology, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey. Electronic address: somel.mehmet@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Mehmet
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Somel
authors.affiliation: Department of Integrative Biology, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA.
authors.forename: Rori
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Rohlfs
authors.affiliation: Key Laboratory of Computational Biology, CAS-MPG Partner Institute for Computational Biology, Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, Shanghai, China.
authors.forename: Xiling
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Liu
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000818:Animals; D005075:Biological Evolution; D001921:Brain / Q000033:anatomy & histology / Q000254:growth & development / Q000378:metabolism*; D018507:Gene Expression Regulation, Developmental; D050437:Genes, Developmental / Q000235:genetics; D006801:Humans; D002679:Pan troglodytes; D013045:Species Specificity; D059467:Transcriptome