Relating protein functional diversity to cell type number identifies genes that determine dynamic aspects of chromatin organisation as potential contributors to organismal complexity

Organismal complexity broadly relates to the number of different cell types within an organism and generally increases across a phylogeny. Whilst gene expression will underpin organismal complexity, it has long been clear that a simple count of gene number is not a sufficient explanation. In this paper, we use open-access information from the Ensembl databases to quantify the functional diversity of human genes that are broadly involved in transcription. Functional diversity is described in terms of the numbers of paralogues, protein isoforms and structural domains for each gene. The change in functional diversity is then calculated for up to nine orthologues from the nematode worm to human and correlated to the change in cell-type number. Those with the highest correlation are subject to gene ontology term enrichment and interaction analyses. We found that a range of genes that encode proteins associated with dynamic changes to chromatin are good candidates to contribute to organismal complexity.