Housekeeping gene

This article is about the general topic of housekeeping genes. For a list of housekeeping genes that should be used as reference standard, see reference genes.

In molecular biology, housekeeping genes are typically constitutive genes that are required for the maintenance of basic cellular function, and are expressed in all cells of an organism under normal and patho-physiological conditions.[1][2][3][4] Although some housekeeping genes are expressed at relatively constant rates in most non-pathological situations, the expression of other housekeeping genes may vary depending on experimental conditions.[1][5]

The origin of the term "housekeeping gene" remains obscure. Literature from 1976 used the term to describe specifically tRNA and rRNA.[6] For experimental purposes, the expression of one or multiple housekeeping genes is used as a reference point for the analysis of expression levels of other genes. The key criterion for the use of a housekeeping gene in this manner is that the chosen housekeeping gene is uniformly expressed with low variance under both control and experimental conditions. Validation of housekeeping genes should be performed before their use in gene expression experiments such as RT-PCR. Recently a web-based database of human and mouse housekeeping genes and reference genes/transcripts, named Housekeeping and Reference Transcript Atlas (HRT Atlas), was developed to offer updated list of housekeeping genes and reliable candidate reference genes/transcripts for RT-qPCR data normalization.[1] This database can be accessed at http://www.housekeeping.unicamp.br.

  1. ^ a b c Hounkpe, Bidossessi Wilfried; Chenou, Francine; de-Lima, Franciele; De-Paula, Erich Vinicius (2020-07-14). "HRT Atlas v1.0 database: redefining human and mouse housekeeping genes and candidate reference transcripts by mining massive RNA-seq datasets". Nucleic Acids Research. 49 (D1): D947–D955. doi:10.1093/nar/gkaa609. ISSN 0305-1048. PMC 7778946. PMID 32663312.
  2. ^ Cite error: The named reference housekeeping was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  3. ^ Butte AJ, Dzau VJ, Glueck SB (December 2001). "Further defining housekeeping, or "maintenance," genes Focus on "A compendium of gene expression in normal human tissues"". Physiological Genomics. 7 (2): 95–96. doi:10.1152/physiolgenomics.2001.7.2.95. PMID 11773595.
  4. ^ Zhu J, He F, Hu S, Yu J (October 2008). "On the nature of human housekeeping genes". Trends in Genetics. 24 (10): 481–484. doi:10.1016/j.tig.2008.08.004. PMID 18786740.
  5. ^ Greer S, Honeywell R, Geletu M, Arulanandam R, Raptis L (April 2010). "Housekeeping genes; expression levels may change with density of cultured cells". Journal of Immunological Methods. 355 (1–2): 76–79. doi:10.1016/j.jim.2010.02.006. PMID 20171969.
  6. ^ Rifkind RA, Marks PA, Bank A, Terada M, Maniatis GM, Reuben R, Fibach E (Nov–Dec 1976). "Erythroid differentiation and the cell cycle: some implications from murine foetal and erythroleukemic cells". Annales d'Immunologie. 127 (6): 887–893. PMID 1070288.