Effect of OMP on gene expression in the olfactory epithelium

OMP is expressed only in mature olfactory sensory neurons, arguing that its function is specially suited to the needs of OSNs. However none of the properties of OMP suggest any direct role in regulating gene expression in OSNs. Our data confirms that gene expression in the olfactory epithelium of mice lacking OMP is indistinguishable from mice expressing OMP. We used affymerix M430v2.0 gene chips to cover as much of genome as possible and observed no statistically significant differences in mRNA abundance between the two genotypes.These results imply that OMPs ability to regulate signal transduction with in OSNs has little effect on gene expression and that its ability to promote mitosis in neighbouring cells (under culture conditions) is insufficiently active under normal laboratory housing conditions to generate detectable differences in gene expression patterns. Keywords: genetic modification The overall design of the experiment is to undertand the effect of OMP (olfactory marker protein) on gene expression in the olfactory epithelium. We isolated the olfactory epithelium from homozygous and heterozygous OMP-GFP mice, extracted the RNA and hybridized on to the mouse expression set 430 2.0 Chip.