Microarrays in evolutionary neuroscience

by Caio Maximino in Principles of Neurobiotaxis

Most comparative genetic studies in the primate lineage – specially the clade that includes humans, chimpanzees and macaques – have concentrated on the identification of genes that underwent significant changes in terms of sequence or in terms of the rate of nucleotide changes. The recent fuzz are the genes microcephalin and ASPM, which seem to regulate brain sizes, whose evolution seem to have been driven by strong positive selection. Microarray studies of those genes demonstrated that there is an unusual pattern of amino-acid substitution in both genes in humans, when compared to both chimps and macaques, which implies large sequence changes in the human lineage. In a recent article, Todd Preuss and colleagues tried to convince us why microarrays are important in the study of evolutionary neuroscience.... Read more »