Sex Biased Gene Expression Profiling of Human Brains at Major Developmental Stages

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Abstract

There are many differences in brain structure and function between males and females. However, how these differences were manifested during development and maintained through adulthood are still unclear. Here we present a time series analyses of genome-wide transcription profiles of the human brain, and we identified genes showing sex biased expression at major developmental stages (prenatal time, early childhood, puberty time and adulthood). We observed a great number of genes (>2,000 genes) showing between-sex expression divergence at all developmental stages with the greatest number (4,164 genes) at puberty time. However, there are little overlap of sex-biased genes among the major developmental stages, an indication of dynamic expression regulation of the sex-biased genes in the brain during development. Notably, the male biased genes are highly enriched for genes involved in neurological and psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, Alzheimer's disease and autism, while no such pattern was seen for the female-biased genes, suggesting that the differences in brain disorder susceptibility between males and females are likely rooted from the sex-biased gene expression regulation during brain development. Collectively, these analyses reveal an important role of sex biased genes in brain development and neurodevelopmental disorders.

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