Project description:A fundamental question in developmental biology is whether there are mechanisms to detect stem cells with mutations that although do not adversely affect their viability, would compromise their ability to contribute to further development. Here we show that cell competition is a novel mechanism regulating the fitness of embryonic stem cells (ESCs). We find that ESCs displaying defective BMP signalling, defective autophagy or are tetraploid are eliminated at the onset of differentiation by wild-type cells. This elimination occurs in an apoptotic dependent manner and is mediated by secreted factors. Furthermore, during this process we find that establishment of differential cMyc levels is critical and that cMyc over-expression is sufficient to induce competitive behaviour in ESCs. Cell competition is therefore a process that allows recognition and elimination of defective cells during the early stages of development and is likely to play important roles in tissue homeostasis and stem cell maintenance. We used microarrays to compare the gene expression profiles of Bmpr1a-/- and control embryonic stem cells (ESCs) in the ESC state and after differentiation in N2B27 Microarray profiles of control and Bmpr1a-/- mouse embryonic stem cells in embryonic stem cell culture media and in N2B27
Project description:To describe the protein profile in hippocampus, colon and ileum tissue’ changing after the old faeces transplants, we adopted a quantitative label free proteomics approach.
Project description:Endodermal progenitor cells (EP cells) are derived from human embryonic stem cell(ESC)-derived definitive endoderm (DE) cells. EP cells are cultured in high BMP media and DE cells are in high Activin media. Both cells can be further differentiated to liver, pancreas, etc. We used microarray to detail the global gene expression profile of DE cells and EP cells to delineate the difference of DE cells and EP cells.
Project description:Introgressed variants from other species can be an important source of genetic variation because they may arise rapidly, can include multiple mutations on a single haplotype, and have often been pretested by selection in the species of origin. Although introgressed alleles are generally deleterious, several studies have reported introgression as the source of adaptive alleles-including the rodenticide-resistant variant of Vkorc1 that introgressed from Mus spretus into European populations of Mus musculus domesticus. Here, we conducted bidirectional genome scans to characterize introgressed regions into one wild population of M. spretus from Spain and three wild populations of M. m. domesticus from France, Germany, and Iran. Despite the fact that these species show considerable intrinsic postzygotic reproductive isolation, introgression was observed in all individuals, including in the M. musculus reference genome (GRCm38). Mus spretus individuals had a greater proportion of introgression compared with M. m. domesticus, and within M. m. domesticus, the proportion of introgression decreased with geographic distance from the area of sympatry. Introgression was observed on all autosomes for both species, but not on the X-chromosome in M. m. domesticus, consistent with known X-linked hybrid sterility and inviability genes that have been mapped to the M. spretus X-chromosome. Tract lengths were generally short with a few outliers of up to 2.7 Mb. Interestingly, the longest introgressed tracts were in olfactory receptor regions, and introgressed tracts were significantly enriched for olfactory receptor genes in both species, suggesting that introgression may be a source of functional novelty even between species with high barriers to gene flow.
Project description:A transcriptome study in mouse hematopoietic stem cells was performed using a sensitive SAGE method, in an attempt to detect medium and low abundant transcripts expressed in these cells. Among a total of 31,380 unique transcript, 17,326 (55%) known genes were detected, 14,054 (45%) low-copy transcripts that have no matches to currently known genes. 3,899 (23%) were alternatively spliced transcripts of the known genes and 3,754 (22%) represent anti-sense transcripts from known genes.
Project description:To model and characterize the chromatin regulatory landscape of the very first developmental cell fates, we made use of three previously derived and well-characterized Trophoblast Stem Cell (TSCs), Embryonic Stem Cell (ESC) and Extra Embryonic Stem Cell lines (XENs) We performed HiChIP to profile putative enhancer interactions in TSC, ESC, XEN and EPISC cells