Project description:A control vs. genetic knockout experiment aimed at determining what RNAs are upregulated or downregulated in e11.5 mouse proximal limb tissue lacking the Lmx1b gene. Because Lmx1b is required for dorsal-ventral patterning of the limb, this screen gives insight into what putative downstream targets of Lmx1b contribute to dorsal-ventral patterning. Experiment Overall Design: The proximal portion of e11.5 hindlimb buds (~500um) was used for RNA extraction. Each array was hybridized with pooled cRNAs from both hindlimb buds of three embryos (6 hindlimbs/sample).
Project description:A control vs. genetic knockout experiment aimed at determining what RNAs are upregulated or downregulated in E13.5 mouse limb tissue lacking the Lmx1b gene. Because LMX1B is required for dorsal-ventral patterning of the limb, this screen gives insight into what putative downstream targets of Lmx1b contribute to dorsal-ventral patterning. The forelimb or hindlimb of wild-type controls or Lmx1b loss-of-function mutants was used for RNA extraction. Each array was hybridized with cDNAs of an individual limb.
Project description:Transcriptomes of mouse embryonic autopods were generated detecting expression of approximately 26179 transcripts in the developing forelimb or hindlimb autopods, representing about 58 % of the probe sets on MOE-430 A/B GeneChip. Three biological replicate array experiments were finished for each condition and MAS5.0 signal were used to do data analysis. Forty-four transcripts with expression differences higher than 2-fold were detected(T test, P<0.05), including Tbx4, Tbx5, Hoxc10 and Pitx1 which were previously shown to be differentially expressed in developing forelimb and hindlimb bud by in situ hybridization and SAGE study (Margulies 2001). RTPCR and in situ experiments confirmed several top differentially expressed genes which were newly discovered by our experiments. Vast amount of transcripts and its family members such as Bmp, Fgf, Epha, Wnt, T-box and Hox families detected to be highly expressed or differentially expressed in developing autopods, suggesting that the complexity of transcriptomes of developing autopods and dynamic differential expression and differential combinations of gene expression signals in the developing limb tissue contributes to differences in forelimb versus hindlimb patterning. The differentially expressed genes are the essential factors for morphological diversification of developing limb structures.
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.