Pronounced strain-specific chemosensory receptor gene expression in the mouse vomeronasal organ

BMC Genomics

Research Article

Kyle Duyck¹  Ariel Paulson¹  Limei Ma¹  C. Ron Yu²  Vasha DuTell³ 

[1] Stowers Institute for Medical Research, 1000 East 50th Street, 64110, Kansas City, MO, USA;Stowers Institute for Medical Research, 1000 East 50th Street, 64110, Kansas City, MO, USA;Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology, University of Kansas Medical Center, 3901 Rainbow Boulevard, 66160, Kansas City, KS, USA;Stowers Institute for Medical Research, 1000 East 50th Street, 64110, Kansas City, MO, USA;Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience, University of California, 567 Evans Hall, 94720, Berkeley, USA;

关键词: Vomeronasal;    Pheromone;    Sexual dimorphic;    Strain;    Innate behavior;    G-protein coupled receptor;    Transcriptome;   

DOI  :  10.1186/s12864-017-4364-4

 received in 2017-07-18, accepted in 2017-12-01,  发布年份 2017

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundThe chemosensory system plays an important role in orchestrating sexual behaviors in mammals. Pheromones trigger sexually dimorphic behaviors and different mouse strains exhibit differential responses to pheromone stimuli. It has been speculated that differential gene expression in the sensory organs that detect pheromones may underlie sexually-dimorphic and strain-specific responses to pheromone cues.ResultsWe have performed transcriptome analyses of the mouse vomeronasal organ, a sensory organ recognizing pheromones and interspecies cues. We find little evidence of sexual dimorphism in gene expression except for Xist, an essential gene for X-linked gene inactivation. Variations in gene expression are found mainly among strains, with genes from immune response and chemosensory receptor classes dominating the list. Differentially expressed genes are concentrated in genomic hotspots enriched in these families of genes. Some chemosensory receptors show exclusive patterns of expression in different strains. We find high levels of single nucleotide polymorphism in chemosensory receptor pseudogenes, some of which lead to functionalized receptors. Moreover, we identify a number of differentially expressed long noncoding RNA species showing strong correlation or anti-correlation with chemoreceptor genes.ConclusionsOur analyses provide little evidence supporting sexually dimorphic gene expression in the vomeronasal organ that may underlie dimorphic pheromone responses. In contrast, we find pronounced variations in the expression of immune response related genes, vomeronasal and G-protein coupled receptor genes among different mouse strains. These findings raised the possibility that diverse strains of mouse perceive pheromone cues differently and behavioral difference among strains in response to pheromone may first arise from differential detection of pheromones. On the other hand, sexually dimorphic responses to pheromones more likely originate from dimorphic neural circuits in the brain than from differential detection. Moreover, noncoding RNA may offer a potential regulatory mechanism controlling the differential expression patterns.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© The Author(s). 2017