How many human genes can be defined as housekeeping with current expression data

摘要: Housekeeping (HK) genes are ubiquitously expressed in all tissue/cell types and constitute a basal transcriptome for the maintenance of basic cellular functions. Partitioning transcriptomes into HK tissue-specific (TS) relatively is fundamental studying gene expression differentiation. Although many studies have aimed at large-scale thorough categorization human genes, meaningful consensus has yet to be reached. We collected two latest datasets (both EST microarray data) from public databases analyzed profiles 18 tissues that been well-documented by both data types. Benchmarked manually-curated collection (HK408), we demonstrated present sampling was far saturated, inadequacy limited detectability our understanding TS expressions. Due likely over-stringent threshold, showed higher false negative rate compared with data, leading significant underestimation genes. Based on found 40.0% currently annotated were universally least 16 tissues, as only 5.1% specifically single tissue. Our current EST-based estimate ranged 3,140 6,909 number, ten-fold increase comparison previous microarray-based estimates. concluded fraction depositories, broadly expressed. still preliminary required much more high-quality transcriptomic future studies. The new list categorized this study will useful genome-wide analyses structural functional features