Effect of maternal dioxin exposure on pituitary mRNAs in fetal rats at gestational day 18. Effect of maternal dioxin exposure on pituitary mRNAs in fetal rats at gestational day 18

We found that oral administration of TCDD (1 µg/kg) to pregnant rats on gestational day 15 suppressed pituitary syntheisis of growth hormone during the last fetal stage. We performed a DNA microarray analysis to identify the genes linked to the attenuated expression of GH, using the male and female fetal pituitary at GD18 when the reduced expression of GH started to occur because of TCDD. Overall design: Total RNAs were extracted from the pituitaries of the control and TCDD-exposed fetal rats at gestational day 18 (both males and females, each N=3), and their cDNAs were applied to the analysis using 44K 60-mer oligomicroarray (Whole Rat Genome Microarray 4x44K v3; Agilent Technologies)