Full-length cDNA sequening of brain-expressed gene of a cynomolgus monkey, Macaca fasciculariswas reported in PLOS Biology, and appeared in January as an online version.
In this paper, full-length cDNA sequencing on the brain transcriptome of an Old World monkey (OWM) was carried out, and then conducted comparative analysis among human, OWM, chimpanzee, and mouse. Authors belongs to the reserach institute and/or university in Japan, Taiwan, and USA. Dr. Takashi Gojobori, director of Center for Information Biology and DNA Data Bank of Japan(CIB-DDBJ), is one of the authors.
Brains of higher primates have evolved rapidly, whereas brain-expressed genes are known to evolve slowly in mammals. In human, there are a lot of questions between the rate of evolution of brain-expressed genes and evolution of the brain itself. To clear this questions, comparative study of the variation of the DNA sequences of various species is necessary.
The data was submitted to DDBJ/EMBL/GenBank International Nucleotide Sequence Databases and was released under the Accession numbers AB170063 - AB174733. The sequence information is available via DDBJ anonymous FTP (whole data download) or getentry system.