title: Gene expression profiling of chicken primordial germ cell ESTs.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Germ cells are the only cell type that can penetrate from one generation to next generation. At the early embryonic developmental stages, germ cells originally stem from primordial germ cells, and finally differentiate into functional gametes, sperm in male or oocyte in female, after sexual maturity. This study was conducted to investigate a large-scale expressed sequence tag (EST) analysis in chicken PGCs and compare the expression of the PGC ESTs with that of embryonic gonad.
  
  
  RESULTS
  We constructed 10,851 ESTs from a chicken cDNA library of a collection of highly separated embryonic PGCs. After chimeric and problematic sequences were filtered out using the chicken genomic sequences, there were 5,093 resulting unique sequences consisting of 156 contigs and 4,937 singlets. Pearson chi-square tests of gene ontology terms in the 2nd level between PGC and embryonic gonad set showed no significance. However, digital gene expression profiling using the Audic's test showed that there were 2 genes expressed significantly with higher number of transcripts in PGCs compared with the embryonic gonads set. On the other hand, 17 genes in embryonic gonads were up-regulated higher than those in the PGC set.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Our results in this study contribute to knowledge of mining novel transcripts and genes involved in germline cell proliferation and differentiation at the early embryonic stages.
authors.affiliation: Department of Food and Animal Biotechnology, Seoul National University, Seoul 151-921, Korea. jaehan@snu.ac.kr
authors.forename: Jae Yong
authors.initials: JY
authors.lastname: Han
authors.forename: Tae Sub
authors.initials: TS
authors.lastname: Park
authors.forename: Jin Nam
authors.initials: JN
authors.lastname: Kim
authors.forename: Mi A
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Kim
authors.forename: Dajeong
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Lim
authors.forename: Jeong Mook
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: Lim
authors.forename: Heebal
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Kim
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D002454:Cell Differentiation / Q000235:genetics; D049109:Cell Proliferation; D002642:Chick Embryo; D019295:Computational Biology / Q000379:methods; D018076:DNA, Complementary / Q000737:chemistry / Q000235:genetics; D020224:Expressed Sequence Tags; D020869:Gene Expression Profiling; D018507:Gene Expression Regulation, Developmental / Q000235:genetics; D005854:Germ Cells / Q000378:metabolism*; D008969:Molecular Sequence Data; D017422:Sequence Analysis, DNA
chemical_list: D018076:DNA, Complementary