Developmental stages after fertilization in Salmo salar

Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar L.) is an environmentally and economically important organism and its gene content is reasonably well characterized. From a transcriptional standpoint, it is important to characterize the normal changes in gene expression over the course of early development, from fertilization through to the parr stage.S. salar samples were taken at 17 time points from 2 to 89 days post fertilization. Total RNA was extracted and cRNA was synthesized and hybridized to a new 44K oligo salmonid microarray platform. Quantified results were subjected to preliminary data analysis and submitted to NCBI’s Gene Expression Omnibus. Throughout the entire period of development, several thousand genes were found to be differentially regulated. This work represents the trancriptional characterization of a very large geneset that will be extremely valuable in further examination of the transcriptional changes in Atlantic salmon during the first few months of development. The expression profiles can help to annotate salmon genes in addition to being used as references against any number of experimental variables that developing salmonids might be subjected to. 17 time points (2 - 89 dpf) with three samples for each time point Equimolar amounts from all three individuals in each time point were pooled. Then reference pool was created by including equal quantities cRNA from each time point, except for the first time point which had less material included.