Project description:We performed RNA-seq and proteomics on naturally infested green ash (F. pennsylvanica) trees at low, medium and high levels of increasing emerald ash borer (A. planipennis) infestation. Our integrative analysis of the RNA-Seq and proteomics data identified 14 proteins and 4 transcripts that contribute most to the difference between highly infested and low infested trees.
Project description:The gold standard for examining pluripotency of stem cells is to see whether cells can contribute to entire body of animals. Here we show that the increased frequency of Zscan4 activation in mouse ES cells not only enhances, but also maintains their developmental potency in long-term cell culture. As the potency increases, even a whole animal can be produced from a single ES cell injected into 4N blastocyst at unusually high success rate. Although Zscan4-activated cells express genes that are also expressed in 2-cell stage mouse embryos, transiently Zscan4-activated state of ES cells is not associated with the high potency of ES cells. It is thus concluded that ES cells acquire higher potency by going through transient Zscan4 activation state more frequently than the regular state. Taken together, our results indicate that frequent activation of Zscan4 can rejuvenate pluripotent stem cells. MC1 ES cells (for pZscan4-Emerald transfection) and R26R6 ES cells (for pZscan4-Cre ERT2 transfection) were grown on gelatin in 6-well plate, 5x10^5cells in suspension were transfected with 1ug of linearized pZscan4-Emerald vector or pZscan4-Cre ERT2 vector using Effectene (QIAGEN) according manufacturer protocol, and plated in gelatin coated 100 mm dishes. Cells were selected with 5 ug/ml blasticidin, colonies were picked on the 8th day, expanded and frozen for further analysis. DNA microarray analysis of pZscan4-Emerald cells was carried out as described. In brief, universal Mouse Reference RNA (Stratagene) were labeled with Cy5-dye, mixed with Cy3-labeled samples, and used for hybridization on the NIA Mouse 44K Microarray v2.2 (manufactured by Agilent Technologies #014117). The intensity of each gene feature was extracted from scanned microarray images using Feature Extraction 9.5.1.1 software (Agilent Technologies). Microarray data analyses were carried out by using an application developed in-house to perform ANOVA and other analyses (NIA Array Analysis software; http://lgsun.grc.nia.nih.gov)