Brain-specific genes may be expressed in multiple distinct neuronal cell types and in a way resemble house-keeping genes in terms of shared cell types.
The similarity in phenotype seen with the loss of either Nfib or Nr3c1, together with the shared cell-type expression requirement suggests that these two genes may co-regulate a specific set of genes essential for lung maturation.
Anatomical differences will make it difficult to determine whether observed differences in transcript abundance represent differential regulation within shared cell-types or variation in the cell-type composition of male and female tissues.
Because many tissues can share cell types, or cell functions, we calculated the number of shared genes between tissues.
Interestingly, the profiles for the various lobes of the brain were strongly correlated, suggesting that the shared methylation pattern of these tissues was established in a shared developmental precursor cell type and/or that the functions of these cells are sufficiently similar to be reflected in a similar pattern of epigenetic modifications.
Thus, similar genomic profiles between basal-like breast cancer and serous ovarian cancer are likely due to the high-frequency mutation in TP53 in both the cancer types, rather than that they share similar cell type origin.
A significant fraction of TR4 binding sites was shared among cell types.
In agreement with previous literature [ 34], a large proportion of CTCF bound regions and H3K4me3 marks are shared among cell types, whereas DNase-seq data sets are in greater variation.
We found wide diversity of miRNAs between endothelial, epithelial and hematologic cells with 99 miRNAs shared across cell types and 31 miRNAs unique to ECs.
The consistency between our observations in mammary epithelial cells and NSCs and between mouse and human suggests that these functions are shared across cell types and evolutionarily conserved.
This has revealed ~35,000 CTCF-binding sites in the mammalian genome, of which more than 70% are shared between cell types.
