Gene expression profiling in developing human hippocampus.

The gene expression profile of developing human hippocampus is of particular interest and importance to neurobiologists devoted to development of the human brain and related diseases. To gain further molecular insight into the developmental and functional characteristics, we analyzed the expression profile of active genes in developing human hippocampus. Expressed sequence tags (ESTs) were selected by sequencing randomly selected clones from an original 3'-directed cDNA library of 150-day human fetal hippocampus, and a digital expression profile of 946 known genes that could be divided into 16 categories was generated. We also used for comparison 14 other expression profiles of related human neural cells/tissues, including human adult hippocampus. To yield more confidence regarding differential expression, a method was applied to attach normalized expression data to genes with a low false-positive rate (<0.05). Finally, hierarchical cluster analysis was used to exhibit related gene expression patterns. Our results are in accordance with anatomical and physiological observations made during the developmental process of the human hippocampus. Furthermore, some novel findings appeared to be unique to our results. The abundant expression of genes for cell surface components and disease-related genes drew our attention. Twenty-four genes are significantly different from adult, and 13 genes might be developing hippocampus-specific candidate genes, including wnt2b and some Alzheimer's disease-related genes. Our results could provide useful information on the ontogeny, development, and function of cells in the human hippocampus at the molecular level and underscore the utility of large-scale, parallel gene expression analyses in the study of complex biological phenomena.