Laser capture microdissected vervet monkey lateral geniculate nucleus hybridized to the Rhesus Macaque Genome Array.

This report is based on an ongoing study to examine gene expression differences in monkey lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN). For this study, samples from an Old World species, vervet monkey (Cercopithecus aethiops), were cross-hybridized to the Rhesus Macaque Genome Array (Affymetrix). Microarray analysis was performed using laser capture microdissected populations of individual neuronal cell bodies isolated from the LGN compared to heterogeneous samples from whole lamina. We show here that cross-species hybridization of microdissected brain tissue samples from vervet monkeys to the Rhesus array produced reliable and biologically relevant data sets. We present the first list of genes enriched in the large neuronal cell bodies of the LGN. We found that these cell bodies are concentrated with genes involved in metabolic processes and protein synthesis, whereas signaling molecules including chemokines and integrins were expressed at higher levels within heterogeneous samples. Our data set provides support for a contribution of Wnt signaling in adult monkey LGN. Keywords: gene expression profile Samples originated from magnocellular and parvocellular layers of the Lateral Geniculate Nucleus of vervet monkeys (Cercopithecus aethiops). We obtained neuronal cell body samples and heterogeneous layer samples from each layer, with N = 3 individual adult male animal replicates for each sample group (N = 12 total samples). Samples were hybridized to the Rhesus Macaque Genome Array. Two of the samples were also hybridized to the human HGU-133plus2 array for comparison.