Human Accelerated Region 1

Human Accelerated Region 1(en.wikipedia.org)

125 points by apollinaire 105 days ago | 58 comments

yubblegum 105 days ago |

> HAR1A is active in the developing human brain between the 7th and 18th gestational weeks.

Anyone know of a resource that layouts the temporal activation patterns for all the genes for the life cycle of a human being?

tgbugs 105 days ago | |

Let's assume that you mean activation patterns at the level of single cells. Aside from the ethical issues which make it virtually impossible to obtain the full set of data, there is also the fact that the exact timing of expression is one of the major ways in which development produces variability in phenotype and so can vary wildly between individuals. The closest we have right now might be HUBMAP [0] or HCA [1], but I don't think that those had as objectives covering multiple developmental timepoints.

0. https://portal.hubmapconsortium.org/ 1. https://data.humancellatlas.org/

stenl 105 days ago | | |

My group published a cell atlas of the developing human brain in 2023, giving gene expression in single cells from postconception week 5 to 13. It’s on github: https://github.com/linnarsson-lab/developing-human-brain

The NIH BRAIN initiative is working on the next generation of that, covering more timepoints and better spatial data.

yubblegum 105 days ago | | |

Thanks!

liquid_thyme 105 days ago | |

There are various types of triggers for gene activation, some genes turn on/off all the time (housekeeping), some follow the circadian rythm, some are immediate response, some are specific to specific phases of cell division, some are persistently on all the time, etc ,etc. Not sure what type of chart you're looking for.

yubblegum 105 days ago | | |

Thanks. Those modal categories of activations are a great start for organizing a visualization. I wonder what sort of patterns would show up. For example, what role does placement in a specific chromosome have (if at all!) in determining whether the gene is periodic, reactive, systemic, or developmental , etc.

> Not sure what type of chart you're looking for. Just geek curiosity.

alfiedotwtf 104 days ago | | |

> some follow the circadian rythm

Oh no…

As someone who has an highly irregular sleeping pattern, do you know of any or where I can find more info on this?

bonsai_spool 105 days ago | |

This can't be done reliably but you may want to look at Tabula Sapiens which doe some of what you'd like. It's not an obvious problem in lots of ways.

yubblegum 105 days ago | | |

Thanks. Suprised no one has made a visualization (even if it has gaps).

> It's not an obvious problem in lots of ways.

Care to expand on this?

Link for others:

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abl4896

https://maayanlab.cloud/Harmonizome/dataset/Tabula+Sapiens+G...

flufluflufluffy 105 days ago | |

As others have said, a complete dataset for that is basically impossible. You would have to monitor every cell type in an individual from the moment of conception until death. Maybe in a couple hundred years we’ll have nanotech robots that could do that, and our overall morals and ideas of what constitutes ethical research will have changed enough that we allow the creation of such humans with these robots inside them.

red75prime 105 days ago |

Interesting. So, the human brain is the scaled-up monkey brain with significant architectural changes.

timdiggerm 105 days ago | |

What did you think it was before you read this brief Wikipedia article?

graemep 105 days ago | |

Of course it is, and you could say the same with regard to mammalian brains in general. However the divergence starts very early in development (seven weeks) so is very big and very significant. By the time a human is born the brain is very different from a monkey's.

utopiah 105 days ago | |

What was the alternative?

lukeify 105 days ago | | |

We didn’t have any. The project manager set it at 3 story points.

red75prime 105 days ago | | |

Scaling-up without significant architectural changes.

curiousObject 105 days ago | | |

Evolution would design the alternative to be something slightly less capable than the minimum. /s

Really, the likelihood is that these mutations must have had an impact that far outweighs their space in the genome.

That’s how all our close competition got murdered by Homo Sapiens. Just significant difference in mental abilities.

xattt 105 days ago | |

There has to be a car analogy for this.

tclancy 105 days ago | |

Which is why we think we're the center of the universe.