Abstract
Motivation: The question of what makes the human brain functionally different from that of other closely related primates, such as the chimpanzee, has both philosophical as well as practical implications. One of the challenges faced with such studies, however, is the small sample size available. Furthermore, expression values for multiple brain regions have an inherent structure that is generally ignored in published studies.
Results: We present a new statistical approach to identify genes with species specific expression, that (1) avoids multiple pairwise comparisons, which can be susceptible to small changes in expression as well as intransitivity, and (2) pools information across related data sets when available to produce more robust results, such as in the case of gene expression across multiple brain regions. We demonstrate through simulations that our model can much better identify human specific genes than the naive approach. Applications of the model to two previously published data sets, one microarray and one RNA-Seq, suggest a moderately large benefit from our model. We show that our approach produces more robust gene classifications across regions, and greatly reduces the number of human specific genes previously reported, which we show were primarily due to the noise in the underlying data.
Electronic Supplementary Material The online version of this chapter (https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33416-1_1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Availability and Implementation: Code for estimating the Markov random field parameters and obtaining posterior probabilities for the MRF can be found in the data package attached. All code is written in R.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Zhixiang Lin, for discussion of the Markov random field model and its applications.
Funding LD was supported by the National Library of Medicine Informatics training grant. HZ was supported in part by NIH R01 GM59507.
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Diao, L., Zhu, Y., Sestan, N., Zhao, H. (2020). Modeling Species Specific Gene Expression Across Multiple Regions in the Brain. In: Zhao, Y., Chen, DG. (eds) Statistical Modeling in Biomedical Research. Emerging Topics in Statistics and Biostatistics . Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33416-1_1
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