Mus musculus Transcriptome or Gene expression. Mus musculus

The activity of neural precursor cells in the adult hippocampus is regulated by various stimuli; however, whether these stimuli regulate the same or different precursor populations is not known. To examine this, we developed a cell sorting protocol that allows the purification to homogeneity of neurosphere-forming precursors and examined the responsiveness of individual precursors to various stimuli in a clonal assay. We show that within the Hes5-GFP+/Nestin-GFP+/EGFR+ cell population, which comprises the majority of neurosphere-forming precursors, there are distinct subpopulations of quiescent precursor cells, which are activated directly in response to either depolarization by high KCl or norepinephrine (NE). In order to examine whether NE- and KCl-activated quiescent precursor cells generate progeny with similar or different molecular profiles,whole transcriptome profiling on large neurospheres using next-generation sequencing (RNA-Seq) has been done in this experiment.