Identification of Sox9-Regulated Pathways During Early Pancreas Organogenesis

Sox9 target genes were identified by comparing gene expression in Sox9-ablated versus wild-type pancreata using microarray analysis. Sox9 was conditionally ablated in the developing pancreas via recombination of a Sox9-flox allele (Kist et al., 2002) using the Pdx1-Cre transgene (Gu et al., 2002). Total RNA was isolated and pooled from dorsal pancreatic epithelia of e12.5 Sox9fl/fl; Pdx1-Cre (mutant) versus Sox9fl/fl (wild-type) littermates for three biological replicates.