A quantitative model for characterizing the evolutionary history of mammalian gene expression

Abstract

Characterizing the evolutionary history of a gene's expression profile is a critical component for understanding the relationship between genotype, expression, and phenotype.However, it is not well-established how best to distinguish the different evolutionary forces acting on gene expression. Here, we use RNA-seq across 7 tissues from 17 mammalian species to show that expression evolution across mammals is accurately modeled by the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck (OU) process. This stochastic process models expression tr…