Award details

Low oxygen microarray

Reference	BBS/E/R/00000695
Principal Investigator / Supervisor	Professor Christopher Whitelaw
Co-Investigators / Co-Supervisors
Institution	The Roslin Institute
Department	The Roslin Institute Department
Funding type	Research
Value (£)	45,287
Status	Completed
Type	Institute Project
Start date	01/06/2006
End date	30/09/2006
Duration	4 months

Abstract

The inner cell mass of early stage blastocysts can give rise to stem cell lines. These inner cell mass-derived lines, called embryonic stem cells, are minimally defined as pluripotent (primate and human derived lines) and in one instance totipotent (mouse). We have recently demonstrated that room oxygen (21% O2) culture is detrimental to clonal recovery of hESC. Physiologic oxygen (2% O2) culture improves clonal recovery rates from 2% (at room oxygen) to 25% (at physiologic oxygen). However, cells adapted to physiologic oxygen culture do not survive being switched back into room oxygen (when plated at clonal levels). The reciprocal switch (room oxygen to physiologic oxygen) resulted in an immediate rescue of clonal recovery levels to physiologic oxygen levels. In addition hESC cultured in physiologic oxygen are smaller, less complex, with less spontaneous chromosomal aberrations than their room oxygen counterparts. Reductions in size and complexity are both surrogate indicators for dedifferentiation. These findings led us to reason that the ambient oxygen level was not a passive bystander but an active reagent potentially involved in alterations in gene expression (and levels of gene expression) leading to the experimentally testable hypothesis that physiologic oxygen alters gene expression profiles such that pathways required for survival in room oxygen become down regulated and non-functional (see above). To test this hypothesis we propose to perform microarray analysis on RNA extracted from cells cultured in either room oxygen or physiologic oxygen.

Summary

unavailable

Committee	Closed Committee - Genes & Developmental Biology (GDB)
Research Topics	X – not assigned to a current Research Topic
Research Priority	X – Research Priority information not available
Research Initiative	X - not in an Initiative
Funding Scheme	X – not Funded via a specific Funding Scheme

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