Abstract
Handedness and language are two well-studied examples of asymmetrical brain function in humans. Approximately 90% of humans exhibit a right-hand preference, and the vast majority shows left-hemisphere dominance for language function. Although genetic models of human handedness and language have been proposed, the actual gene expression differences between cerebral hemispheres in humans remain to be fully defined. In the present study, gene expression profiles were examined in both hemispheres of three cortical regions involved in handedness and language in humans and their homologues in rhesus macaques: ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, posterior superior temporal cortex (STC), and primary motor cortex. Although the overall pattern of gene expression was very similar between hemispheres in both humans and macaques, weighted gene correlation network analysis revealed gene co-expression modules associated with hemisphere, which are different among the three cortical regions examined. Notably, a receptor-enriched gene module in STC was particularly associated with hemisphere and showed different expression levels between hemispheres only in humans.
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Modified from Scalable Brain Atlas (https://scalablebrainatlas.incf.org). b Principal component analysis (PCA) of human samples (n = 74) and macaque samples (n = 30) used in the present study. Samples are colored by hemisphere, as shown in the upper-right legend. Notably, the PCA displays no clustering. c Bar graphs of the measured Spearman distance coefficients between left and right hemispheres for gene pairs of human (red) and macaque (blue)
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09 May 2017
An erratum to this article has been published.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health (NS042867, NS073134, and NS092988), National Science Foundation (SMA-1542848), as well as the James S. McDonnell Foundation (220020293). We would like to thank the Duke Microarray Core facility (a Duke NCI Cancer Institute and a Duke Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy shared resource facility) for their technical support, microarray data management, and feedback on the generation of the microarray data reported in this manuscript. We are also grateful to David Allen Hughes for his helpful discussions and suggestions.
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Macaque microarrays were submitted to National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO accession number GSE76644).
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An erratum to this article is available at https://doi.org/10.1007/s00429-017-1433-z.
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Muntané, G., Santpere, G., Verendeev, A. et al. Interhemispheric gene expression differences in the cerebral cortex of humans and macaque monkeys. Brain Struct Funct 222, 3241–3254 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00429-017-1401-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00429-017-1401-7