High-throughput long-read sequencing of total RNA in the mouse fertilized eggs

Transcriptome analysis of fertilized eggs in early development is very important, but the details of gene expression analysis remain unclear because of the difficulty of analyzing gene expression in a limited number of cells and the fact that gene expression regulation in early embryos is different from that in somatic cells. Recently, long-read sequencing has become available that allows sequencing of long DNA and RNA. In this study, in order to reveal the regulatory mechanism of gene expression in fertilized eggs, we are conducting transcriptome analysis following the developmental stages from 1 cell to blastocyst by using one of the long-read sequencers, PromethION by Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT).