Hypoxia effect on embryonic hearts of Tibetan Chicken, Dwarf Recessive White Chicken and Shouguang Chicken

Adaptation to hypoxia is a complicated and important physiological course for organisms, but the genetic mechanism underlying the adaptation is not fully understood yet. Tibetan Chicken (T), an indigenous chicken breed in China which inhabit in high areas with an altitude above 2,900 meters. Shouguang Chicken(S) and Dwarf Recessive White Chicken (DRW), two lowland chicken breeds, were used as control groups. The heart was the first functional organ to develop during the embryonic development. Furthermore, the heart is an efficient energy converter utilizing the most appropriate fuel for a given environment. Therefore, GeneChip® Chicken Genome Array was employed to identify the differentially expressed genes in embryonic hearts of Tibetan Chicken and two lowland chicken breeds in both hypoxic and normoxic incubating environments with a genome wide profile. Keywords: stress response To obtain general expression profiles of embryonic hearts in Tibetan Chicken(T), Dwarf Recessive White Chicken (DRW)and Shouguang Chicken (S)in hypoxia and normoxia, the fertilized full sib eggs of all the three chicken breeds were incubated under two different conditions. The heart was isolated from all the three chicken breeds under the two different conditions for RNA extraction and hybridization on Affymetrix microarrays.