Rapid Evolution of snRNA and snoRNA Expression in Human and Animal Brain Tissue

By developing size-fractionation procedure coupled with high-throughput sequencing, we explored snRNAs and snoRNAs expression in the frontal cortex of four mammalian species: humans, chimpanzees, rhesus monkeys and mice. To our surprise, we show that expression of these transcripts has undergone a number of drastic changes on the primate and mouse lineages, including the past 6-8 million of human evolutionary history.