Stockholm Bioinformatics Centre, Science for Life Laboratory, Solna, Sweden.
Gene. 2012 Apr 15;497(2):228-36. doi: 10.1016/j.gene.2012.01.029. Epub 2012 Feb 4.
mRNA expression is widely used as a proxy for protein expression. However, their true relation is not known and two genes with the same mRNA levels might have different abundances of respective proteins. A related question is whether the coexpression of mRNA for gene pairs is reflected by the corresponding protein pairs. We examined the mRNA-protein correlation for both expression and coexpression. This analysis yielded insights into the relationship between mRNA and protein abundance, and allowed us to identify subsets of greater mRNA-protein coherence. The correlation between mRNA and protein was low for both expression and coexpression, 0.12 and 0.06 respectively. However, applying the best-performing quality measure, high-quality subsets reached a Spearman correlation of 0.31 for expression, 0.34 for coexpression and 0.49 for coexpression when restricted to functionally coupled genes. Our methodology can thus identify subsets for which the mRNA levels are expected to be the strongest correlated with protein levels.
mRNA 表达通常被用作蛋白质表达的替代物。然而，它们之间的真实关系并不清楚，并且具有相同 mRNA 水平的两个基因可能具有不同丰度的相应蛋白质。一个相关的问题是基因对的 mRNA 是否共同表达反映了相应的蛋白质对的共同表达。我们检查了表达和共表达的 mRNA-蛋白质相关性。这项分析深入了解了 mRNA 和蛋白质丰度之间的关系，并使我们能够识别出具有更高 mRNA-蛋白质一致性的子集。mRNA 和蛋白质之间的相关性无论是在表达还是共表达中都很低，分别为 0.12 和 0.06。然而，应用表现最佳的质量度量标准，高质量子集的 Spearman 相关性分别达到 0.31（表达）、0.34（共表达）和 0.49（当限制为功能偶联基因时的共表达）。因此，我们的方法可以识别出那些 mRNA 水平与蛋白质水平最相关的子集。
