Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Somel, Mehmet
• Franz, Henriette
• Yan, Zheng
• Lorenc, Anna
• Guo, Song
• Giger, Thomas
• Kelso, Janet
• Nickel, Birgit
• Dannemann, Michael
• Bahn, Sabine
• Webster, Maree J
• Weickert, Cynthia S
• Lachmann, Michael
• Pääbo, Svante
• Khaitovich, Philipp

Titel

Transcriptional neoteny in the human brain

Ist Teil von

• Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS, 2009-04, Vol.106 (14), p.5743-5748

Ort / Verlag

United States: National Academy of Sciences

Erscheinungsjahr

2009

Quelle

MEDLINE

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• In development, timing is of the utmost importance, and the timing of developmental processes often changes as organisms evolve. In human evolution, developmental retardation, or neoteny, has been proposed as a possible mechanism that contributed to the rise of many human-specific features, including an increase in brain size and the emergence of human-specific cognitive traits. We analyzed mRNA expression in the prefrontal cortex of humans, chimpanzees, and rhesus macaques to determine whether human-specific neotenic changes are present at the gene expression level. We show that the brain transcriptome is dramatically remodeled during postnatal development and that developmental changes in the human brain are indeed delayed relative to other primates. This delay is not uniform across the human transcriptome but affects a specific subset of genes that play a potential role in neural development.