Project description:Analysis of early stages of alcohol dependence at the gene expression level. The hypothesis tested in the present study was that ethanol-treatment impact gene expression in a mouse model of high ethanol consumption. Results provide important information of genes and pathways being affected by ethanol actions in the mouse frontal cortex. Total RNA obtained from frontal cortex from mice treated with 20% ethanol solution for 20 days. Control group is composed of untreated animals. Frontal cortex (FCtx) tissue was dissected to produce a 2-mm coronal section from the most rostral portion of the mouse brain devoid of olfactory bulbs (coordinates Bregma +1.56 to +3.56). The dorsal part of this coronal section, cut immediately above the forceps minor of the corpus callosum as the anatomical landmark, was used for RNA extraction. This section of the cortex is mostly composed of frontal associated cortex (FrA), cingulate cortex area 1 (Cg1), prelimbic cortex (PrL), and primary (M1) and secondary (M2) motor cortices, as depicted in the mouse brain atlas (Franklin and Paxinos 2007). Samples from both alcohol-treated and control groups were always included in each batch of extracted RNA. Total RNA was extracted using the mirVanaM-BM-. miRNA Isolation kit (Ambion, Austin, TX) according to the manufacturerM-bM-^@M-^Ys instructions. Yield and quality of the total RNA preparation was determined using the Agilent 2100 Bioanalyzer (Agilent, Palo Alto, CA). For mRNA expression profiling, biotin-labeled cRNA was prepared using Illumina TotalPrep RNA Amplification kit (Ambion, Austin, TX) and then hybridized to Illumina MouseRef-8 v2.0 Expression BeadChips (Illumina, San Diego, CA). The quality of the Illumina bead summary data was assessed using the Bioconductor packages Lumi and arrayQualityMetrics. Data preprocessing included variance stabilization and quantile normalization using the Lumi package. Statistical analysis comparing ethanol-treated and control groups was performed using the Bioconductor package limma, which implements an empirical Bayes approach in R (Smyth 2005). False discovery rate (FDR) was assessed using the Benjamini-Hochberg method.
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:Analysis of early stages of alcohol dependence at the gene expression level. The hypothesis tested in the present study was that ethanol-treatment impact gene expression in a mouse model of high ethanol consumption. Results provide important information of genes and pathways being affected by ethanol actions in the mouse frontal cortex.
Project description:We collected whole genome testis expression data from hybrid zone mice. We integrated GWAS mapping of testis expression traits and low testis weight to gain insight into the genetic basis of hybrid male sterility.