Project description:A major challenge in biology is to determine how evolutionarily novel characters originate, however, mechanistic explanations for the origin of novelties are almost completely unknown. The evolution of mammalianM-BM- pregnancy is an excellent system in which to study the origin of novelties because extant mammals preserve major stages in the transition from egg-laying to live-birth. To determine the molecular bases of this transition we characterized the pregnant/gravid uterine transcriptome from tetrapods, including species in the three major mammalian lineages, and used ancestral transcriptome reconstruction to trace the evolutionary history of uterine gene expression. We show that thousands of genes evolved endometrial expression during the origins of mammalian pregnancy, including numerous genes that mediate maternal-fetal communication and immunotolerance.Furthermore we show that thousands of regulatory elements active inM-BM- decidualized human endometrial stromal cellsM-BM- are derived from ancient mammalian transposable elements which provided binding sites for transcription factors that mediate decidualization and endometrial cell-type identity.M-BM- Our results indicate that one of the defining mammalian novelties evolved via domestication of ancient mammalian transposable elements into hormone-responsive regulatory elements throughout the genome. Examination of histone modification and DNAse hypersensitivity in decidualized dESC
Project description:A major challenge in biology is to determine how evolutionarily novel characters originate, however, mechanistic explanations for the origin of novelties are almost completely unknown. The evolution of mammalian pregnancy is an excellent system in which to study the origin of novelties because extant mammals preserve major stages in the transition from egg-laying to live-birth. To determine the molecular bases of this transition we characterized the pregnant/gravid uterine transcriptome from tetrapods, including species in the three major mammalian lineages, and used ancestral transcriptome reconstruction to trace the evolutionary history of uterine gene expression. We show that thousands of genes evolved endometrial expression during the origins of mammalian pregnancy, including numerous genes that mediate maternal-fetal communication and immunotolerance.Furthermore we show that thousands of regulatory elements active in decidualized human endometrial stromal cells are derived from ancient mammalian transposable elements which provided binding sites for transcription factors that mediate decidualization and endometrial cell-type identity. Our results indicate that one of the defining mammalian novelties evolved via domestication of ancient mammalian transposable elements into hormone-responsive regulatory elements throughout the genome.
2015-01-30 | GSE61793 | GEO
Project description:Novelties
| PRJEB49689 | ENA
Project description:Novelties
| PRJEB49621 | ENA
Project description:Cynanchum wilfordii and its related species (Apocynaceae)
Project description:A major challenge in biology is to determine how evolutionarily novel characters originate, however, mechanistic explanations for the origin of novelties are almost completely unknown. The evolution of mammalian pregnancy is an excellent system in which to study the origin of novelties because extant mammals preserve major stages in the transition from egg-laying to live-birth. To determine the molecular bases of this transition, we characterized the pregnant/gravid uterine transcriptome from tetrapods, including species in the three major mammalian lineages, and used ancestral transcriptome reconstruction to trace the evolutionary history of uterine gene expression. We show that thousands of genes evolved or lost uterine expression during the origins of mammalian pregnancy, including the loss of genes responsible for the mineralization of the eggshell in the Mammalian and Therian stem-lineages, and the recruitment of genes into uterine expression that mediate maternal-fetal communication and maternal immunotolerance of the fetal allograft in the Therian and Eutherian stem-lineages. Our results indicate that one of the defining mammalian novelties evolved through a step-wise process that dramatically changed uterine gene expression, generating a suite of evolutionary innovations that support prolonged gestations. We report genome-wide gene expression generated by mRNA-Seq from the pregnant endometrium of dog, armadillo, and the platypus.
Project description:Global analysis of brassinosteroid (BR)-mediated gene expression under abiotic stress identifies BR associated mechanisms of stress tolerance, and new stress-related genes
Project description:We were interested in investigating the transcriptome responses to exogenous applications of brassinosteroid hormone when Arabidopsis seedlings are pre-stressed with a reactive oxygen species, hydrogen peroxide. We were interested in seeing which subsets of BR-responsive gene transcripts were most affected and how BR-responsive gene transcripts responded to increasing concentrations of hydrogen peroxide both as a whole and individually.