Conservation, Acquisition, and Functional Impact of Sex-biased Gene Expression in Mammals

Overview

Journal Science

Specialty Science

Date 2019 Jul 20

PMID 31320509

Citations 112

Authors

Sahin Naqvi

Alexander K Godfrey

Jennifer F Hughes

Mary L Goodheart

Richard N Mitchell

David C Page

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Sex differences abound in human health and disease, as they do in other mammals used as models. The extent to which sex differences are conserved at the molecular level across species and tissues is unknown. We surveyed sex differences in gene expression in human, macaque, mouse, rat, and dog, across 12 tissues. In each tissue, we identified hundreds of genes with conserved sex-biased expression-findings that, combined with genomic analyses of human height, explain ~12% of the difference in height between females and males. We surmise that conserved sex biases in expression of genes otherwise operating equivalently in females and males contribute to sex differences in traits. However, most sex-biased expression arose during the mammalian radiation, which suggests that careful attention to interspecies divergence is needed when modeling human sex differences.

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