As we were unsure if a high rate of molecular evolution might be a general feature of cancer-associated genes, we performed a similar analysis on p53, but this gene, well known for its central role in a range of cancers in all tissue types, showed no evidence of rapid adaptive evolution.
Pairwise comparisons between muscle tissues and other tissue types showed, as expected, higher variance.
Functional analyses revealed that all three tissue types showed equivalent significant functional enrichment when compared with the pooled assembly.
For the betweenness centrality, the testes had an observed mean significantly lower than the expected mean, while the remaining tissue types showed non-significant differences.
In general, the results of VEGF-C mRNA expression among the three tissue types showed the same trends as those obtained for ECM1 (Table 3).
For the closeness centrality, all but one (the lymph node) tissue types had an observed mean greater than expected: six tissue types had an observed mean significantly greater than expected while the remaining tissue types showed non-significant differences.
For the HuGE Index dataset, 7 of the 19 tissue types had observed means significantly greater than the expected means, while the remaining tissue types showed a non-significant difference.
For the EST-SAGE dataset, 11 of the 20 tissue types had observed means significantly greater than the expected means, while the remaining tissue types showed a non-significant difference.
The measurement of methylation patterns in six distinct tissue types showed that methylation of pseudogenes can be highly variable in different tissues and suggested that methylation of CpG sites may be differentially regulated in these tissues.
All three predominant tissue types showed statistically significant scattering differences from one another (FG v. A, adj. P < 0.0001; FG v. FA, adj. P = 0.011; A v. FA, adj. P = 0.0026).
