title: Disease association and inter-connectivity analysis of human brain specific co-expressed functional modules.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  In the recent studies, it is suggested that the analysis of transcriptomic change of functional modules instead of individual genes would be more effective for system-wide identification of cellular functions. This could also provide a new possibility for the better understanding of difference between human and chimpanzee.
  
  
  RESULTS
  In this study, we analyzed to find molecular characteristics of human brain functions from the difference of transcriptome between human and chimpanzee's brain using the functional module-centric co-expression analysis. We performed analysis of brain disease association and systems-level connectivity of species-specific co-expressed functional modules.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Throughout the analyses, we found human-specific functional modules and significant overlap between their genes in known brain disease genes, suggesting that human brain disorder could be mediated by the perturbation of modular activities emerged in human brain specialization. In addition, the human-specific modules having neurobiological functions exhibited higher networking than other functional modules. This finding suggests that the expression of neural functions are more connected than other functions, and the resulting high-order brain functions could be identified as a result of consolidated inter-modular gene activities. Our result also showed that the functional module based transcriptome analysis has a potential to expand molecular understanding of high-order complex functions like cognitive abilities and brain disorders.
authors.affiliation: Department of Bio and Brain Engineering, KAIST, Daejeon, Korea. kimin@kaist.ac.kr.
authors.forename: Kimin
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Oh
authors.affiliation: Department of Information and Communications Engineering, KAIST, Daejeon, Korea. fanteo@kaist.ac.kr.
authors.forename: Taeho
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Hwang
authors.affiliation: Department of Bio and Brain Engineering, KAIST, Daejeon, Korea. mrcha@kaist.ac.kr.
authors.forename: Kihoon
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Cha
authors.affiliation: Department of Bio and Brain Engineering, KAIST, Daejeon, Korea. gsyi@kaist.ac.kr.
authors.forename: Gwan-Su
authors.initials: GS
authors.lastname: Yi
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001921:Brain / Q000378:metabolism*; D020869:Gene Expression Profiling / Q000379:methods; D053263:Gene Regulatory Networks / Q000235:genetics*; D020022:Genetic Predisposition to Disease / Q000145:classification / Q000235:genetics; D006801:Humans; D009434:Neural Pathways / Q000378:metabolism*; D002679:Pan troglodytes / Q000235:genetics*; D059467:Transcriptome