Zhang Yijuan, Li Ding, Sun Bingyun
Department of Chemistry and Department of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada.
PLoS One. 2015 May 13;10(5):e0123691. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0123691. eCollection 2015.
The searching of human housekeeping (HK) genes has been a long quest since the emergence of transcriptomics, and is instrumental for us to understand the structure of genome and the fundamentals of biological processes. The resolved genes are frequently used in evolution studies and as normalization standards in quantitative gene-expression analysis. Within the past 20 years, more than a dozen HK-gene studies have been conducted, yet none of them sampled human tissues completely. We believe an integration of these results will help remove false positive genes owing to the inadequate sampling. Surprisingly, we only find one common gene across 15 examined HK-gene datasets comprising 187 different tissue and cell types. Our subsequent analyses suggest that it might not be appropriate to rigidly define HK genes as expressed in all tissue types that have diverse developmental, physiological, and pathological states. It might be beneficial to use more robustly identified HK functions for filtering criteria, in which the representing genes can be a subset of genome. These genes are not necessarily the same, and perhaps need not to be the same, everywhere in our body.
自转录组学出现以来，寻找人类管家（HK）基因一直是一项长期的探索，这有助于我们理解基因组结构和生物过程的基本原理。已解析的基因常用于进化研究以及作为定量基因表达分析的标准化标准。在过去20年里，已经进行了十几项HK基因研究，但没有一项对人类组织进行过全面采样。我们认为，整合这些结果将有助于去除由于采样不足而产生的假阳性基因。令人惊讶的是，在包含187种不同组织和细胞类型的15个已检测的HK基因数据集中，我们只发现了一个共同基因。我们随后的分析表明，将HK基因严格定义为在具有不同发育、生理和病理状态的所有组织类型中都表达可能并不合适。使用更可靠鉴定的HK功能作为筛选标准可能会有帮助，其中代表性基因可以是基因组的一个子集。这些基因在我们身体的各处不一定相同，也许也不需要相同。
