Further understanding human disease genes by comparing with housekeeping genes and other genes.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Several studies have compared various features of heritable disease genes with other so called non-disease genes, but they have yielded some conflicting results. A potential problem in those studies is that the non-disease genes contained a large number of essential genes--genes which are indispensable for humans to survive and reproduce. Since a functional disruption of an essential gene has fatal consequences, it's more reasonable to regard essential genes as extremely severe "disease" genes. Here we perform a comparative study on the features of human essential, disease, and other genes.

Results

In the absence of a set of well defined human essential genes, we consider a set of 1,789 ubiquitously expressed human genes (UEHGs), also known as housekeeping genes,

SUBMITTER: Tu Z 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC1397819 | biostudies-literature | 2006 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature