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Neuroscience

A mine of imprinted genes

Nature volume 466, pages 823–824 (2010)Cite this article

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Some genes exclusively express only their maternal or paternal copy. Studies of the brain extend the list of such imprinted genes by an order of magnitude, highlighting their spatial and temporal regulation.

Mammals inherit one copy (allele) of each gene from their mother and another copy from their father. Yet for many genes, only one of these alleles is always expressed in a cell1. The choice of which allele to express is random in some cell types — notably those of the olfactory and immune systems; for others, such as those of the developing placenta and brain, certain genes are 'imprinted'2. The hallmark of imprinted genes is that some are expressed only when inherited from the mother and others only when inherited from the father. Imprinted genes were thought to be fewer than 100 in number. But two remarkable studies published in Science by Gregg and colleagues3,4 identify 1,308 candidate imprinted genomic regions in the mouse brain, encompassing 824 annotated genes as well as the entire X chromosome.

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  1. Eric B. Keverne is in the Sub-Department of Animal Behaviour, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB23 8AA, UK. ebk10@cam.ac.uk,

    Eric B. Keverne

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  1. Eric B. Keverne
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Keverne, E. A mine of imprinted genes. Nature 466, 823–824 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/466823a

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