Journal
ROYAL SOCIETY OPEN SCIENCE
Volume 3, Issue 8, Pages -Publisher
ROYAL SOC
DOI: 10.1098/rsos.160275
Keywords
gene family sizes; gene set sizes; power-law; beta rank function
Categories
Funding
- Robert S. Boas Center for Genomics and Human Genetics
- PAPIIT/UNAM [IN107414]
- PASPA/UNAM
- CONACYT Mexico
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The sizes of paralogues-gene families produced by ancestral duplication-are known to follow a power-law distribution. We examine the size distribution of gene sets or gene families where genes are grouped by a similar function or share a common property. The size distribution of Human Gene Nomenclature Committee (HGNC) gene sets deviate from the power-law, and can be fitted much better by a beta rank function. We propose a simple mechanism to break a power-law size distribution by a combination of splitting and merging operations. The largest gene sets are split into two to account for the subfunctional categories, and a small proportion of other gene sets are merged into larger sets as new common themes might be realized. These operations are not uncommon for a curator of gene sets. A simulation shows that iteration of these operations changes the size distribution of Ensembl paralogues and could lead to a distribution fitted by a rank beta function. We further illustrate application of beta rank function by the example of distribution of transcription factors and drug target genes among HGNC gene families.
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