Understanding Tissue-Specific Gene Regulation

Although all human tissues carry out common processes, tissues are distinguished by gene expres-sion patterns, implying that distinct regulatory programs control tissue-specificity. In this study, we investigate gene expression and regulation across 38 tissues profiled in the Genotype-Tissue Expression project. We find that network edges (transcription factor to target gene connections) have higher tissue-specificity than network nodes (genes) and that regulating nodes (transcription factors) are less likely to be expressed in a tissue-specific manner as compared to their targets (genes). Gene set enrichment analysis of network targeting also indicates that regulation of tissue-specific function is largely independent of transcription factor expression. In addition, tissue-specific genes are not highly targeted in their corresponding tissue-network. However, they do assume bottleneck positions due to variability in transcription factor targeting and the influence of non-canonical regulatory interactions. These results suggest that tissue-specificity is driven by context-dependent regulatory paths, providing transcriptional control of tissue-specific processes.

• Publication year

  2017

• Venue

  bioRxiv

• Publication date

  2017-02-21

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1101/110601PMID 29069589PMCID 5828531
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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