Recent studies have shown that projection targets in the mouse neocortex are correlated with their gene expression patterns. However, a brain-wide quantitative analysis of the relationship between voxel genetic composition and their projection targets is lacking to date. Here we extended those studies to perform a global, integrative analysis of gene expression and projection target correlations in the mouse brain. By using the Allen Brain Atlas data, we analyzed the relationship between gene expression and projection targets. We first visualized and clustered the two data sets separately and showed that they both exhibit strong spatial autocorrelation. Building upon this initial analysis, we conducted an integrative correlation analysis of the two data sets while correcting for their spatial autocorrelation. This resulted in a correlation of 0.19 with significant p value. We further identified the top genes responsible for this correlation using two greedy gene ranking techniques. Using only the top genes identified by those techniques, we recomputed the correlation between these two data sets. This led to correlation values up to 0.49 with significant p values. Our results illustrated that although the target specificity of neurons is in fact complex and diverse, yet they are strongly affected by their genetic and molecular compositions.

中文翻译：

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小鼠大脑中基因表达和投射靶标相关性的全局分析。

最近的研究表明，小鼠新皮层中的投射靶标与其基因表达模式相关。但是，迄今为止，尚缺乏对体素遗传组成与其投射目标之间关系的全脑定量分析。在这里，我们扩展了这些研究，以对小鼠大脑中的基因表达和投射靶标相关性进行全局，综合分析。通过使用Allen Brain Atlas数据，我们分析了基因表达与投射靶标之间的关系。我们首先对两个数据集进行了可视化和聚类，结果表明它们都表现出很强的空间自相关性。在此初始分析的基础上，我们对两个数据集进行了综合相关性分析，同时对它们的空间自相关进行了校正。这导致相关性为0。p值显着为19。我们使用两种贪婪基因排名技术进一步确定了导致这种相关性的最高基因。仅使用那些技术确定的最重要的基因，我们重新计算了这两个数据集之间的相关性。这导致相关值高达0.49，且具有显着的p值。我们的研究结果表明，尽管神经元的靶标特异性实际上是复杂多样的，但它们的遗传和分子组成对其影响很大。