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Sex-biased gene expression in the developing brain: implications for autism spectrum disorders.


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Authors

Ziats, Mark N 
Rennert, Owen M 

Abstract

Autism spectrum disorders affect significantly more males than females. Understanding sex differences in normal human brain development may provide insight into the mechanism(s) underlying this disparity; however, studies of sex differences in brain development at the genomic level are lacking. Here, we report a re-analysis of sex-specific gene expression from a recent large transcriptomic study of normal human brain development, to determine whether sex-biased genes relate to specific mechanistic processes. We discovered that male-biased genes are enriched for the processes of extracellular matrix formation/glycoproteins, immune response, chromatin, and cell cytoskeleton. We highlight that these pathways have been repeatedly implicated in autism and demonstrate that autism candidate genes are also enriched for these pathways. We propose that the overlap of these male-specific brain transcriptional modules with the same pathways in autism spectrum disorders may partially explain the increased incidence of autism in males.

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RIGHTS : This article is licensed under the BioMed Central licence at http://www.biomedcentral.com/about/license which is similar to the 'Creative Commons Attribution Licence'. In brief you may : copy, distribute, and display the work; make derivative works; or make commercial use of the work - under the following conditions: the original author must be given credit; for any reuse or distribution, it must be made clear to others what the license terms of this work are.

Keywords

5202 Biological Psychology, 52 Psychology, Human Genome, Genetics, Autism, Women's Health, Pediatric, Biotechnology, Neurosciences, Mental Health, Brain Disorders, Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (IDD), 1.1 Normal biological development and functioning, 2.1 Biological and endogenous factors, Mental health

Journal Title

Mol Autism

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

2040-2392
2040-2392

Volume Title

Publisher

Springer Science and Business Media LLC