Human Embryonic Expression Identifies Novel Essential Gene Candidates

Disruption of essential genes leads to pregnancy loss, early lethality, or severe disease. Current methods to predict genes that underlie severe phenotypes include knockout animal model systems, evolutionary conservation, and variation intolerance metrics. With existing methods, human lethal genes are missed due to interspecies differences or paucity of gene characterization. We analyzed global gene expression in stages of early human development (1-cell to the blastocyst). These data were integrated with all 4049 current murine knockout phenotypes, genome-wide evolutionary gene conservation, and human genic intolerance metrics. We found that currently established human essential genes and orthologs of murine essential genes demonstrate higher gene expression across developmental stages compared to non-essential genes (Wilcoxon rank sum test, p