Promoter features related to tissue specificity as measured by Shannon entropy.

ABSTRACT:

Background

The regulatory mechanisms underlying tissue specificity are a crucial part of the development and maintenance of multicellular organisms. A genome-wide analysis of promoters in the context of gene-expression patterns in tissue surveys provides a means of identifying the general principles for these mechanisms.

Results

We introduce a definition of tissue specificity based on Shannon entropy to rank human genes according to their overall tissue specificity and by their specificity to particular tissues. We apply our definition to microarray-based and expressed sequence tag (EST)-based expression data for human genes and use similar data for mouse genes to validate our results. We show that most genes show statistically significant tissue-dependent variations in expr

SUBMITTER: Schug J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC1088961 | biostudies-literature | 2005

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature