Transcriptome of mouse primary muscle cultures upon dystrophin knockdown by RNAi.. Mus musculus

Dystrophin was knocked down in primary muscle cultures prepared from C57Bl/10 neonate mice using siRNA targeting dystrophin. Also in parallel, primary muscle cultures treated with siRNA targting luciferase were used as controls. The experiment was designed so that the same cell populations were used for both test and control conditions. This helped avoid the heterogeneity associated with the previous studies where test and control cell populations were non-identical. The experiment resulted in a clear transcriptome of dystrophin deficiency and demonstrated dystrophin as a major organizer of myogensis. Moreover, several interesting experimental targets were identified which can potentially open new lines of investigations. Overall design: 18 primary muscle cell cultures were prepared on 4 occasions. 7 cultures were treated with siRNAs targeting dystrophin, 7 received siRNA targeting firefly GL2 luciferase (treatment controls) and 4 remained untreated (untreated controls). RNAs were extracted 48 hours after differentiation induction for expression profiling analysis.