Zebrafish 24hpf mutant sk8 gene expression

The production of functional mRNA involves multiple steps including transcription initiation, elongation, and termination. spt5 encodes a conserved essential transcription elongation factor that controls RNAPII processivity in vitro and co-localizes with RNAPII in vivo. We used microarrays to detail the global expression of gene expression at 24 hours post fertilization in wild-type and Spt5 mutant (fog-sk8) to identify Spt5 transcriptionally dependent genes and affected pathways. Here we report that a mutation in zebrafish spt5, sk8, deregulates <5% of ~10,000 genes examined. These findings reveal a small but diverse set of developmentally regulated genes, whose expression is critically dependent on Spt5-regulated RNAPII stalling in vertebrate development. Keywords: comparison RNA from zebrafish embryos were harvested at 24 hours post fertilization for hybridization to Affymetrix gene arrays.