title: The drug target genes show higher evolutionary conservation than non-target genes.
abstract: Although evidence indicates that drug target genes share some common evolutionary features, there have been few studies analyzing evolutionary features of drug targets from an overall level. Therefore, we conducted an analysis which aimed to investigate the evolutionary characteristics of drug target genes. We compared the evolutionary conservation between human drug target genes and non-target genes by combining both the evolutionary features and network topological properties in human protein-protein interaction network. The evolution rate, conservation score and the percentage of orthologous genes of 21 species were included in our study. Meanwhile, four topological features including the average shortest path length, betweenness centrality, clustering coefficient and degree were considered for comparison analysis. Then we got four results as following: compared with non-drug target genes, 1) drug target genes had lower evolutionary rates; 2) drug target genes had higher conservation scores; 3) drug target genes had higher percentages of orthologous genes and 4) drug target genes had a tighter network structure including higher degrees, betweenness centrality, clustering coefficients and lower average shortest path lengths. These results demonstrate that drug target genes are more evolutionarily conserved than non-drug target genes. We hope that our study will provide valuable information for other researchers who are interested in evolutionary conservation of drug targets.
authors.affiliation: College of Bioinformatics Science and Technology, Harbin Medical University, Harbin, China.
authors.forename: Wenhua
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Lv
authors.affiliation: College of Bioinformatics Science and Technology, Harbin Medical University, Harbin, China.
authors.forename: Yongdeng
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Xu
authors.affiliation: College of Bioinformatics Science and Technology, Harbin Medical University, Harbin, China.
authors.forename: Yiying
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Guo
authors.affiliation: College of Bioinformatics Science and Technology, Harbin Medical University, Harbin, China.
authors.forename: Ziqi
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Yu
authors.affiliation: Department of Radiology, Second Affiliated Hospital, Harbin Medical University, Harbin, China.
authors.forename: Guanglong
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Feng
authors.affiliation: College of Bioinformatics Science and Technology, Harbin Medical University, Harbin, China.
authors.forename: Panpan
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: College of Bioinformatics Science and Technology, Harbin Medical University, Harbin, China.
authors.forename: Meiwei
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Luan
authors.affiliation: College of Bioinformatics Science and Technology, Harbin Medical University, Harbin, China.
authors.forename: Hongjie
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Zhu
authors.affiliation: Genome Analysis Laboratory, Tianjin Institute of Industrial Biotechnology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Tianjin, China.
authors.forename: Guiyou
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: College of Bioinformatics Science and Technology, Harbin Medical University, Harbin, China.
authors.forename: Mingming
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.affiliation: College of Bioinformatics Science and Technology, Harbin Medical University, Harbin, China.
authors.forename: Hongchao
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Lv
authors.affiliation: College of Bioinformatics Science and Technology, Harbin Medical University, Harbin, China.
authors.forename: Lian
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Duan
authors.affiliation: College of Bioinformatics Science and Technology, Harbin Medical University, Harbin, China.
authors.forename: Zhenwei
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Shang
authors.affiliation: College of Bioinformatics Science and Technology, Harbin Medical University, Harbin, China.
authors.forename: Jin
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Li
authors.affiliation: College of Bioinformatics Science and Technology, Harbin Medical University, Harbin, China.
authors.forename: Yongshuai
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Jiang
authors.affiliation: College of Bioinformatics Science and Technology, Harbin Medical University, Harbin, China.
authors.forename: Ruijie
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Zhang
mesh_terms: D017124:Conserved Sequence; D016208:Databases, Factual; D019143:Evolution, Molecular; D063990:Gene Ontology; D005796:Genes / Q000235:genetics*; D015894:Genome, Human / Q000235:genetics*; D006801:Humans; D015810:Linkage Disequilibrium; D008954:Models, Biological; D004364:Pharmaceutical Preparations / Q000378:metabolism*; D060066:Protein Interaction Maps
chemical_list: D004364:Pharmaceutical Preparations
keywords: drug target; evolutionary conservation; topological properties