Katja Nowick, FU Berlin: Human Evolution: How Gene Regulatory Factors and their networks might have shaped human specific phenotypes

Talk Katja Nowick, Seewiesen

  • Datum: 14.11.2019
  • Uhrzeit: 13:00 - 14:00
  • Vortragende: Prof. Dr. Katja Nowick
  • FU Berlin
  • Ort: Seewiesen
  • Raum: Seminar Room House 4, Tea & Coffee 12:30h
  • Gastgeber: Dr. Clemens Küpper
  • Kontakt: ckuepper@orn.mpg.de
<i>Katja Nowick, FU Berlin</i>: Human Evolution: How Gene Regulatory Factors and their networks might have shaped human specific phenotypes
Complex phenotypes are determined by many genes and can well be investigated using network methods. Hence, tostudy the evolution of complex phenotypes, comparative network approaches are very promising. Here we aim to shedlight on the evolution of cognitive abilities in humans. To this end, we used transcriptome data from pre-frontal cortexsamples of humans, chimpanzees, and rhesus macaques to calculate transcription factor (TF) co-expression networks.We revealed an overall increase in connectivity on the human lineage and that several TFs that are known to be involvedin brain development or cognitive disorders have turned into hubs specifically in the human networks. These TFs aregood candidates for further experimental studies on the evolution of cognition.We developed several methods to facilitate comparative network analyses, among them a statistical framework tocombine similar networks into consensus networks of high confidence, to assign p-values to links, and to define conserved,species-specific, and diverged links. Our methods are publicly available via two R packages, wTO and CoDiNA, andcome along with sophisticated interactive visualization. We hope them to be useful for other evolutionary networkstudies.
Zur Redakteursansicht