miRNA expression in C. elegans fem-2(b245ts) and fem-3(q20ts) mutants. Caenorhabditis elegans

We compared animals that produce oocytes but no sperm fem-2(b245ts) to animals that produce sperm but no oocytes fem-3(q20ts). Using miRNA microarrays and we found that the mir-35-41 cluster genes were expressed to much greater extent in oogenesis than in spermatogenesis; furthermore, these miRNAs were the only C. elegans miRNAs that showed such differential germline expression. Overall design: Total RNA was isolated from staged one day old adult populations. The data were obtained from two biological replicates. Each oligonucleotide was printed four times. Data were scaled based on total array intensities (sum of the normalized spot intensities), and data for each sample and each gene were averaged.

我们将产生卵母细胞但不产生精子的fem-2(b245ts)突变体线虫，与产生精子但不产生卵母细胞的fem-3(q20ts)突变体线虫进行对比分析。借助miRNA微阵列（miRNA microarray）分析，我们发现mir-35-41基因簇在卵子发生过程中的表达水平显著高于精子发生过程；此外，这些miRNA是秀丽隐杆线虫（C. elegans）中仅有的在生殖系中呈现此类差异表达的miRNA。
整体实验设计：从同步化培养的1日龄成虫群体中分离总RNA。本实验包含2次生物学重复。每条寡核苷酸探针均印刷4次。数据以阵列总信号强度（标准化斑点信号强度之和）进行归一化处理，并对每个样本的每个基因的检测数据取平均值。