Gene Level Expression Profiling of MEFs derived from wild type and Smurf2-/- embryos

Transcriptome analysis of RNAs extracted from early passage and late passage (immortalized) mouse embryonic fibroblasts (MEFs) We compared the gene expression profiles of early (p.6-7) and immortalized (p.28-33) Smurf2KO cells to those of their wild-type counter parts, and selected the genes that were differentially expressed at a cut-off of 1.54 folds in both B6 and BL backgrounds. The results showed a progressive increase in differential gene activities with the number of cell passages. We detected 101 differentially expressed genes in the early passage and 668 in the immortalized Smurf2KO cells, with 49 in common between these two categories. These data pointed to a global deregulation of gene expression as the cells became immortalized in the absence of Smurf2. We analyzed MEFs from wild type and Smurf2-/- embryos from both C57B6/L (B6) and mixed 129SVJ x NIH Black Swiss (BL) backgrounds using the Affymetrix mouse Exon 1.0 ST platform. No techinical replicates were performed.