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A cell-type based model explaining co-expression patterns of genes in the brain

Much of the genome is expressed in the vertebrate brain, with individual genes exhibiting different spatially-varying patterns of expression. These variations are not independent, with pairs of genes exhibiting complex patterns of co-expression, such that two genes may be similarly expressed in one region, but differentially expressed in other regions. These correlations have been previously studied quantitatively, particularly for the gene expression atlas of the mouse brain, but the biological meaning of the co-expression patterns remains obscure. We propose a simple model of the co-expression patterns in terms of spatial distributions of underlying cell types. We establish the plausibility of the model in terms of a test set of cell types for which both the gene expression profiles and the spatial distributions are known.