Identifying toggle genes from transcriptome-wide scatter: A new perspective for biological regulation

The study of gene expression variability, especially for cancer and cell differentiation studies, has become important. Here, we investigate transcriptome-wide scatter of 23 cell types and conditions across different levels of biological complexity. We focused on genes that act like toggle switches between pairwise replicates of the same cell type, i.e. genes expressed in one replicate and not expressed in the other, sometimes also referred as ON/OFF genes. The proportion of these toggle genes dramatically increases from unicellular to multicellular organization, especially for development and cancer cells. A relevant portion of toggle switches are non-coding genes: in unicellular systems the most represented classes are tRNA and rRNA, while multicellular systems more frequently show lncRNA, sncRNA and pseudogenes. Notably, disease associated microRNAs (miRNAs), pseudogenes and numerous uncharacterized transcripts are present in both development and cancer cells. On top of the known intrinsic and extrinsic factors, our work indicates toggle genes as a novel collective component creating transcriptome-wide variability. This requires further investigation for elucidating both evolutionary and disease processes.

Automated summary

The study investigates the transcriptome-wide scatter of 23 cell types and conditions across different levels of biological complexity, focusing on genes that act as toggle switches between pairwise replicates of the same cell type. It is found that the proportion of toggle genes dramatically increases from unicellular to multicellular organization, with a significant portion being non-coding genes such as tRNA, rRNA, lncRNA, sncRNA, and pseudogenes. The presence of disease associated microRNAs, pseudogenes, and uncharacterized transcripts in both development and cancer cells suggests toggle genes as a novel component creating transcriptome-wide variability.