gene expression between hermaphrodite and male

Hi there,

I was wondering is it possible that gene expression would be different in hermaphrodite and males? No matter what, it happened on me… I was observing the expression pattern of my interested gene, which is promoter::GFP fusion and could be expressed in head and tail neurons. I used heat shock to create the male strain from hermaphrodite, so I assume that they would have same expression. However, it turned out that male worms had higher expression than that of hermaphrodite. Does that make sense? Was someone lucky as me before? Thanks advance for your comments.

There is a large literature regarding sex-specific differences in transcription. E.g., see the Reinke microarray papers from 2000 and 2004 for system-wide analyses of these differences.

Hi Emily – particularly in the tail, the adult male has quite a few more neurons than does the hermaphrodite. So if your promoter shows broad neuronal expression, it wouldn’t be surprising for the male tail to be brighter than that of the hermaphrodite. For more info see the Barr/Garcia chapter on male behavior in Wormbook, and also Portman, Adv Genet. 2007;59:1-37. (Sorry for that last bit of shameless self-promotion.)

Doug

There are many male enriched microRNAs as well.

http://genomebiology.com/content/10/5/R54

Many thanks to you guys. It seems that this stuff only surprises the newbie, like me ;D Anyway, I learned from it. Thanks again.