Transcriptional Profiling of Hh-Treated Embryoid Bodies

This experiment was specifically designed to measure neural targets of Shh signaling, we sought to profile the genes upregulated by Hh signaling in the ventral neural tube to obtain a valid dataset. To obtain ventral-specific markers, we generated retinoic acid-treated EBs grown in the presence or absence of HH-Ag. We did not observe induction of ventral Hh markers in RA-treated constitutive Gli1FLAG EBs and used these for the control, baseline set. The presence of FoxA2, Nkx2.9 and Nkx6.1 amongst the top 10 genes based on expression levels suggests that profiling significantly enriches for Hh-dependent cell types. As expected, the benchmark standard Gli1 was not up-regulated in our array, since it is constitutively expressed in the control as well. Keywords: neural progenitors, embryoid bodies, differentiation, Hedgehog, retinoic acid There are a total of 8 samples. Four biological replicates of Retinoic-acid treated EBs (Baseline) and 4 additional biological samples of retinoic acid + Hh-Ag treated EBs (induced sample).