Mouse strain specific gene expression differences for illumina microarray expression profiling in embryos

Petra Kraus, Xing, Siew Lan Lim, Max E Fun, V Sivakamasundari, Sook Peng Yap, Haixia Lee, R Krishna Murthy Karuturi, Thomas Lufkin

In the field of mouse genetics the advent of technologies like microarray based expression profiling dramatically increased data availability and sensitivity, yet these advanced methods are often vulnerable to the unavoidable heterogeneity of in vivo material and might therefore reflect differentially expressed genes between mouse strains of no relevance to a targeted experiment. The aim of this study was not to elaborate on the usefulness of microarray analysis in general, but to expand our knowledge regarding this potential "background noise" for the widely used Illumina microarray platform surpassing existing data which focused primarily on the adult sensory and nervous system, by analyzing patterns of gene expression at different embryonic stages using wild type strains and modern transgenic models of often non-isogenic backgrounds.