Sex-specific gene expression in preimplantation mouse embryos 英文参考文献.docVIP

Minireview Sex-specific gene expression in preimplantation mouse embryos Guy S Eakin and Anna-Katerina Hadjantonakis Address: Developmental Biology Program, Sloan-Kettering Institute, New York, NY 10021, USA. Correspondence: Anna-Katerina Hadjantonakis. Email: hadj@ Published: 1 March 2006 Genome Biology 2006, 7:205 (doi:10.1186/gb-2006-7-2-205) The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at /2006/7/2/205 ? 2006 BioMed Central Ltd Abstract The 3.5-day-old blastocyst-stage mouse embryo consists of two tissues and contains approximately 60 cells. This tiny structure has now been observed to express nearly 600 genes in a sex-specific fashion, including at least one gene (Rhox/Pem) expressed only in females from their paternal X chromosome. The daily deluge of marketing advertisements might have us believe that our entire lives are occupied with sex. Recent work from Kobayashi and colleagues [1] suggests that this may not be too far from the truth. It has long been observed that gene-expression differences correlated with genetic sex exist at the preimplantation stages. This was first observed 30 years ago, when it was noticed that 50% of eight-cell- stage mouse embryos expressed the histocompatibility Y (Hya) antigen. At the time these were correctly presumed to be the male embryos [2]. Later work [3,4] confirmed their prediction. Since then, several studies have confirmed the existence of a handful of genes that appear to be expressed in a sex-specific fashion in the preimplantation embryo (reviewed in [5]). Kobayashi et al. [1] recently increased that handful of genes by two orders of magnitude when they observed 591 transcripts that appeared to be differentially expressed in either male or female blastocysts. transgene (XGFP) [7]. By breeding XGFPY transgenic males to non-transgenic (XX) females, female progeny could be dis- tingu