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Published on: December 9, 2013
Evolutionary and biomedical implications of sex differences in the primate brain transcriptome
Alex R DeCasien1, Kenneth L Chiou2, Camille Testard3
1Department of Anthropology, New York University, New York, NY, USA; New York Consortium in Evolutionary Primatology, New York, NY, USA; Section on Developmental Neurogenomics, National Institute of Mental Health, Bethesda, MD, USA.
Abstract:
Humans exhibit sex differences in the prevalence of many neurodevelopmental disorders and neurodegenerative diseases. Here, we generated one of the largest multi-brain-region bulk transcriptional datasets for the rhesus macaque and characterized sex-biased gene expression patterns to investigate the translatability of this species for sex-biased neurological conditions. We identify patterns similar to those in humans, which are associated with overlapping regulatory mechanisms, biological processes, and genes implicated in sex-biased human disorders, including autism. We also show that sex-biased genes exhibit greater genetic variance for expression and more tissue-specific expression patterns, which may facilitate rapid evolution of sex-biased genes. Our findings provide insights into the biological mechanisms underlying sex-biased disease and support the rhesus macaque model for the translational study of these conditions.
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