GSE109929
Effects of gene-by-environment interaction on the mRNA profile in the light of differential susceptibility
Purpose: Investigation of effects of early adversity in mice deficient for serotonin transporter on mRNA expression in the context of differential susceptibility Methods: Following prenatal stress and behavioural screening in adulthood, month old females, either wildtype or carrying a heterozygous knockout of the serotonin transporter gene, were sacrificed, brains extracted, the hippocampi of both hemispheres dissected, blended and separated in two protions. From one of these portions RNA was extracted. Extracted RNA was further processed by an external company, i.e. IGA Technologies (Udine, Italy). Following library preparation, samples were sequenced on the illumina HiSeq2000 platform (single end, 50 bp, 30 million reads/sample). Reads were mapped to the Mus musculus GRCm38.p5 genome using STAR (Dobin et al. 2013). Following mapping, the reads per position were determined using HTSeq (Anders et al. 2015). These counts were then used for the analysis of differentially expressed genes (DEGs) using the R package DeSeq2 (Love et al. 2014). Results: dependent on the serotonin transporter genotype and behaviourally determined susceptibility to early life adversity, animals displayed distinct gene expression. As expected, the effect sizes and significances were rather subtle. Conclusion: the modulation of differential susceptibility seems to be modulated by distinct mRNA expression profiles, dependent on the serotonin transporter genotype Overall design: RNA expression affected in serotonin transporter deficient or wildtype offspring of prenatal stress that do or do  not succumb to the adverse effects of prenatal stress, i.e. vulnerable or resilient offspring [contributor] IGA Technologies (Undine, Italy)