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MBE Advance Access published online on March 6, 2006
Molecular Biology and Evolution, doi:10.1093/molbev/msj119
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© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
Accepted March 1, 2006

Research Article

Low Rates of Expression-Profile Divergence in Highly-Expressed Genes and Tissue-Specific Genes During Mammalian Evolution

Ben-Yang Liao 1 and Jianzhi Zhang 1 *

1 Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA

* To whom correspondence should be addressed.
Jianzhi Zhang, E-mail: jianzhi{at}umich.edu


  Abstract

Evolutionary rates provide important information about the pattern and mechanism of evolution. Although the rate of gene sequence evolution has been well studied, the rate of gene expression evolution is poorly understood. In particular, it is unclear whether the gene expression level and tissue-specificity influence the divergence of expression profiles between orthologous genes. Here we address this question using a microarray dataset comprising the expression signals of 10,607 pairs of orthologous human and mouse genes from over 60 tissues per species. We show that the level of gene expression and the degree of tissue-specificity are generally conserved between the human and mouse orthologs. The rate of gene expression-profile change during evolution is negatively correlated with the level of gene expression, measured by either the average or the highest level among all tissues examined. This is analogous to the observation that the rate of gene (or protein) sequence evolution is negatively correlated with the gene expression level. The impacts of the degree of tissue-specificity on the evolutionary rate of gene sequence and that of expression-profile, however, are opposite. Highly tissue-specific genes tend to evolve rapidly at the gene sequence level, but slowly at the expression-profile level. Thus, different forces and selective constraints must underlie the evolution of gene sequence and that of gene expression.

Keywords: evolutionary rate; expression profile; expression level; tissue-specificity; mammals.
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