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Expression of ribosomal subunit genes increased coordinately with postmortem interval in human brain

Molecular Psychiatry volume 11, pages 1067–1069 (2006)Cite this article

It has been well established that postmortem interval (PMI), the time between death and freezing of brain tissue, did not greatly affect the gene expressions.1, 2, 3, 4, 5 In fact, messenger RNA (mRNA) in human brain is relatively stable after death and its integrity was maintained over the long period of time.1, 2, 3, 4, 5 From the data analysis of two independent large sets of DNA microarray experiments, we unexpectedly found that expression of ribosomal subunit genes was consistently increased with PMI, implicating the existence of coordinated gene expression changes with PMI in human brain.

GeneOntology analysis of PMI-correlated probe sets revealed significant over-representation of ribosome-related categories (Figure 1b). Detailed examination of annotations for all the PMI-correlated probe sets revealed that they included 77 probe sets, which corresponded to 54 distinctive ribosomal subunit genes (Supplementary Table 1). They included ribosomal protein components of both small and large subunits, and, strikingly, all of their expressions showed positive correlations with PMI (Figure 1c, for example).

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Figure 1

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratory for Molecular Dynamics of Mental Disorders, RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Wako, Saitama, Japan

    K Iwamoto, M Bundo, J Ueda & T Kato

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  1. K Iwamoto
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  2. M Bundo
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  4. T Kato
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Correspondence to K Iwamoto.

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Supplementary Information accompanies the paper on the Molecular Psychiatry website (http://www.nature.com/mp)

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Iwamoto, K., Bundo, M., Ueda, J. et al. Expression of ribosomal subunit genes increased coordinately with postmortem interval in human brain. Mol Psychiatry 11, 1067–1069 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1038/sj.mp.4001901

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