Project description:This SuperSeries is composed of the following subset Series: GSE28561: Genome-wide maps of HLH-1 binding in muscle-enriched embryos. GSE28562: Genome-wide RNA expression in muscle-enriched embryos across different mutations. Refer to individual Series
Project description:Background: The force generating mechanism of muscle is evolutionarily ancient; the fundamental structural and functional components of the sarcomere are common to motile animals throughout phylogeny. Recent evidence suggests that the transcription factors that regulate muscle development are also conserved. Thus, a comprehensive description of muscle gene expression in a simple model organism should define a basic muscle transcriptome that is also expressed in animals with more complex body plans. To this end, we have applied Micro-Array Profiling of Caenorhabditis elegans Cells (MAPCeL) to muscle cell populations extracted from developing Caenorhabditis elegans embryos. Results: Fluorescence Activated Cell Sorting (FACS) was used to isolate myo-3::GFP-positive muscle cells, and their cultured derivatives, from dissociated early Caenorhabditis elegans embryos. Microarray analysis identified 6,693 expressed genes, 1,305 of which are enriched in the myo-3::GFP positive cell population relative to the average embryonic cell. The muscle-enriched gene set was validated by comparisons to known muscle markers, independently derived expression data, and GFP reporters in transgenic strains. These results confirm the utility of MAPCeL for cell type-specific expression profiling and reveal that 60% of these transcripts have human homologs. Conclusions: This study provides a comprehensive description of gene expression in developing Caenorhabditis elegans embryonic muscle cells. The finding that over half of these muscle-enriched transcripts encode proteins with human homologs suggests that mutant analysis of these genes in Caenorhabditis elegans could reveal evolutionarily conserved models of muscle gene function with ready application to human muscle pathologies. Keywords: embryonic muscle, myo-3::GFP
