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Tissue Specificity of Gene Expression

  • Genomics (S Williams, Section Editor)
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Abstract

Tissue-specific patterns of gene expression are fundamental to establishing and preserving tissue identity and function, and dysregulation of these patterns underlies a wide range of diseases. Over the past few years, several large-scale efforts driven by the advent of RNA sequencing have established resources of gene expression measurements, across both tissues and individuals, toward building a comprehensive understanding of the specificity and variability of gene expression. We summarize these resources, review insights gained into the tissue specificity of gene expression across transcript classes, including protein-coding and non-coding RNAs, and discuss the developments that will be needed to integrate existing and new resources into a detailed map of gene expression and its regulation across the human body.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Cambridge, MA, 02142, USA

    François Aguet & Kristin G. Ardlie

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  1. François Aguet
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  2. Kristin G. Ardlie
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Correspondence to Kristin G. Ardlie.

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François Aguet and Kristin G. Ardlie declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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This article does not contain any studies with human or animal subjects performed by any of the authors.

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This article is part of the Topical collection on Genomics.

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Aguet, F., Ardlie, K.G. Tissue Specificity of Gene Expression. Curr Genet Med Rep 4, 163–169 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40142-016-0105-2

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