Airway Smooth Muscle Differentiation is Essential for Promoting Airway Size, Tracheal Cartilage Segmentation, but Dispensable for Epithelial Branching

The goals of this study are to evalute the role of airway smooth muscle during mouse lung development. We have compared Tbx4rtTA;tetOcre;Mycocdf/f (MyocdCKO) mutants to control mice and generated next generation sequencing transcriptome profiling (RNA-seq) to compare the transcriptomes of each genotype. Overall design: Methods: Lung and trachea mRNA profiles of E18.5 and E13.5 control and MyocdCKO mice were generated by deep sequencing using Illumina HiSeq4000. Sequences in FASTQ files were aligned to the mouse reference genome using STAR (Dobin et al., 2013). Reads were counted using featureCounts and differential expression analysis was performed using DeSeq2 (Liao et al., 2014; Love et al., 2014).