Entrez ID	Official symbol	Synonyms	Description	Location	Type of protein	External annotation
2043	EPHA4	EK8, HEK8, SEK, TYRO1	EPH receptor A4	2q36.1	protein-coding	Genecard

uniprot_summary

refseq_summary

Receptor tyrosine kinase which binds membrane-bound ephrin family ligands residing on adjacent cells, leading to contact-dependent bidirectional signaling into neighboring cells. The signaling pathway downstream of the receptor is referred to as forward signaling while the signaling pathway downstream of the ephrin ligand is referred to as reverse signaling. Highly promiscuous, it has the unique property among Eph receptors to bind and to be physiologically activated by both GPI-anchored ephrin-A and transmembrane ephrin-B ligands including EFNA1 and EFNB3. Upon activation by ephrin ligands, modulates cell morphology and integrin-dependent cell adhesion through regulation of the Rac, Rap and Rho GTPases activity. Plays an important role in the development of the nervous system controlling different steps of axonal guidance including the establishment of the corticospinal projections. May also control the segregation of motor and sensory axons during neuromuscular circuit development. In addition to its role in axonal guidance plays a role in synaptic plasticity. Activated by EFNA1 phosphorylates CDK5 at Tyr-15 which in turn phosphorylates NGEF regulating RHOA and dendritic spine morphogenesis. In the nervous system, plays also a role in repair after injury preventing axonal regeneration and in angiogenesis playing a role in central nervous system vascular formation. Additionally, its promiscuity makes it available to participate in a variety of cell-cell signaling regulating for instance the development of the thymic epithelium.

This gene belongs to the ephrin receptor subfamily of the protein-tyrosine kinase family. EPH and EPH-related receptors have been implicated in mediating developmental events, particularly in the nervous system. Receptors in the EPH subfamily typically have a single kinase domain and an extracellular region containing a Cys-rich domain and 2 fibronectin type III repeats. The ephrin receptors are divided into 2 groups based on the similarity of their extracellular domain sequences and their affinities for binding ephrin-A and ephrin-B ligands. Multiple transcript variants encoding different isoforms have been found for this gene.

Caregory	Description	Value	Value range ( Low - High )	Comment
PLI	The probability of being loss-of-function (LoF) intolerant	1.0	[0, ..., 1]	Genes with high pLI scores (pLI ≥ 0.9) are extremely LoF intolerant, whereby genes with low pLI scores (pLI ≤ 0.1) are LoF tolerant. The score is calculated based on high-quality exome sequence data (ExAC) for 60,706 individuals of diverse ethnicities.
Haploinsufficiency (HI) score rank	Predicted probability of exhibiting haploinsufficiency		[100, ..., 1]	High ranks (e.g. 0-10%) indicate a gene is more likely to exhibit haploinsufficiency, low ranks (e.g. 90-100%) indicate a gene is more likely to NOT exhibit haploinsufficiency (DECIPHER, PMID: 20976243). haploinsufficiency means a single functional copy of a gene is insufficient to maintain its normal function and is extremely intolerant of LoF variation.
Gene brain expressed	Queried gene is expressed in brain tissues	True	[False, True]	The gene expression data are extracted from GTEx v7 and BrainSpan. A gene with the expression value of (log 2 based (TPM+1)) at least 1 TPM/RPKM/FPKM in one or more tissues related to the brain is considered brain-expressed.
Protein brain expressed	Queried protein is expressed in brain tissues	True	[False, True]	The protein expression data are extracted from ProteomicsDB (v2018.09). A protein with the expression value of (log based 10 (iBAQ intensity)) at least 0.5 in one or more tissues related to the brain is considered brain-expressed protein.
Carrying LoF DNMs	Number of loss-of-function DNMs hit the queried gene	0 (Case)	[0, ..., 67] with average of 0.160	Loss of function (LoF) mutations include frameshift indels, nonsense (stop-gained) and splice-site mutations, which can result in the gene product having less or no function and can have deleterious consequences.
		0 (Control)	[0, ..., 6] with average of 0.044
Carrying missense DNMs	Number of missense DNMs hit the queried gene	2 (Case)	[0, ..., 55] with average of 0.846	Missense mutations can result in changes in protein sequences, but are commonly considered to have less deleterious impacts than LoF mutations.
		0 (Control)	[0, ..., 21] with average of 0.300
FMRP binding targets	FMRP inteacting parters	True	[False, True]	FMRP loss of function causes Fragile X syndrome (FXS). The binding targets identified crosslinking immunoprecipitation (HITS-CLIP) in mouse brains (PMID:21784246). Many FMRP targets are among genes implicated in different neuropsychiatric diseases, such as autism, schizophrenia.
Postsynaptic density (PSD)	Protein associates with postsynaptic membranes of excitatory synapses	True	[False, True]	Abnormalities with PSD proteins are linked to various neuropsychiatric diseases including neurodevelopmental disorders.
Human essential genes	-	False	[False, True]	Genes are thought to be critical for human survival.