Expression sensitivity analysis of human disease related genes.

Background. Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have shown its revolutionary power in seeking the influenced loci on complex diseases genetically. Thousands of replicated loci for common traits are helpful in diseases risk assessment. However it is still difficult to elucidate the variations in these loci that directly cause susceptibility to diseases by disrupting the expression or function of a protein currently. Results. We evaluate the expression features of disease related genes and find that different diseases related genes show different expression perturbation sensitivities in various conditions. It is worth noting that the expression of some robust disease-genes doesn't show significant change in their corresponding diseases, these genes might be easily ignored in the expression profile analysis. Conclusion. Gene ontology enrichment analysis indicates that robust disease-genes execute essential function in comparison with sensitive disease-genes. The diseases associated with robust genes seem to be relatively lethal like cancer and aging. On the other hand, the diseases associated with sensitive genes are apparently nonlethal like psych and chemical dependency diseases.