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↵2M.L., S.P., and P.K. contributed equally as supervisors of this study.
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Edited by Morris Goodman, Wayne State University, School of Medicine, Detroit, MI, and approved February 18, 2009 (received for review January 16, 2009)
Abstract
In development, timing is of the utmost importance, and the timing of developmental processes often changes as organisms evolve. In human evolution, developmental retardation, or neoteny, has been proposed as a possible mechanism that contributed to the rise of many human-specific features, including an increase in brain size and the emergence of human-specific cognitive traits. We analyzed mRNA expression in the prefrontal cortex of humans, chimpanzees, and rhesus macaques to determine whether human-specific neotenic changes are present at the gene expression level. We show that the brain transcriptome is dramatically remodeled during postnatal development and that developmental changes in the human brain are indeed delayed relative to other primates. This delay is not uniform across the human transcriptome but affects a specific subset of genes that play a potential role in neural development.
Footnotes
- 1To whom correspondence may be addressed. E-mail: somel{at}eva.mpg.de or khaitovich{at}eva.mpg.de
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Author contributions: S.B., M.J.W., C.S.W., M.L., S.P., and P.K. designed research; H.F., Z.Y., A.L., and B.N. performed research; A.L., S.G., T.G., J.K., M.D., S.B., M.J.W., and C.S.W. contributed new reagents/analytic tools; M.S., M.L., and P.K. analyzed data; and M.S., M.L., S.P., and P.K. wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
Freely available online through the PNAS open access option.
Transcriptional neoteny in the human brain
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