A comparative genome analysis of gene expression reveals different regulatory mechanisms between mouse and human embryo pre-implantation development

Background

Pre-implantation development is a crucial step in successful implantation and pregnancy in mammals. It has been studied in depth, but mostly in laboratory animal models. Less is known about the regulatory mechanism involved in the pre-implantation development in humans and about the comparative aspects.

Methods

Here, we employed the microarray datasets from the public database library of GEO and applied comparative analysis of genome wide temporal gene expression data based on statistical analysis and functional annotation for both mouse and human, demonstrating the discordance between the regulatory mechanisms of both mouse and human pre-implantation development.

Results

There were differences between mouse and human pre-implantation development both in the global gene expression pattern and in the expression changes of individual genes at each stage, including different major transient waves of transcription profiles and some stage-specific genes and significantly related pathways. There also appeared to be different functional changes from one stage to another between mouse and human.

Conclusions

The analysis presented here lead to interesting and complementary conclusions that the regulatory mechanism of human pre-implantation development is not completely the same as the mouse. Not as the fact that 1-cell to 2-cell stage is important for mouse pre-implantation development, the 4-cell stage and 8-cell stage are both essential for human. Unlike in mouse, of which most of pathways found were related to energy, RNA and protein metabolism, the identified pathways in human were mostly disease-related and associated with human pre-implantation embryonic development. All of these suggest that a further comparative analysis should be required for applying the result of mouse expression data to human research or therapy, particularly in pre-implantation developments. Our study provides several potential targets of genes and pathways for studying the regulatory mechanism of human pre-implantation development using mouse model.