Regulation of uterine genes during the peri‐implantation period, and its relationship to the maternal brain in gestating mice

Abstract

We conducted an integrated analysis of gene expression and chromatin structure of mouse uterus to understand the regulation of uterine-expressed genes on gestation day 4 (GD4) during the peri-implantation period. The genes expressed in the uterus showed a significant association (p < .0001) with the presence of the nucleosomefree region (open chromatin) in the 5′-untranslated region of the genes. The majority of these upstream open chromatins harbored a common class of regulatory elementsknown as upstream open reading frames. We also compared the gene expression profiles between the uterus and brain which showed that specific gene pairs were expressed in a correlated manner, either positively or negatively. In addition, specific ligand/receptor genes showed coordinated patterns of expression between the uterus and brain on GD4, and the level of expression of these ligand/receptors altered significantly in the brain during late pregnancy (GD15) compared with the peri-implantation period (GD4). Collectively, these results suggest that regulation of the uterine genes during the peri-implantation period is likely to have a functional link with the maternal brain in pregnant mice. K E Y W O R D S bidirectional promoter, neuroendocrine signaling, open chromatin, pregnancy establishment, uterine receptivity

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“…RNA-seq data analysis . The analysis of RNA-seq data was performed as described in our earlier studies [ 10 , 45 ]. Briefly, the quality of raw sequences was checked with FastQC (Version 0.11.9, Babraham Institute, Cambridge, UK).…”

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