New York City College of Technology – City University of New York
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Human patients afflicted with neuropsychiatric illnesses have presented with significantly higher levels of circulating inflammatory cytokines independent of any infection. This proves interesting in the context of biomarkers for differential diagnosis, but may also contribute to perturbations of neural function. A rodent model of schizophrenia called Maternal Immune Activation (MIA) studies symptomology in mice that have been born to mothers that were infected during pregnancy. This illustrates that circulating cytokines can alter neural development within the in utero environment to recapitulate the disease state. This dataset looks at the long-term gene expression changes in adult mice from the MIA model in order to address functional deficits towards the identification of interventions and genes associated with abnormal functioning in this model.
Timed pregnant mice were ordered and habituated from shipping. Pregnant mice were infected nasally with influenza virus or saline. Pups were reared (without cross-fostering) until adulthood where littermates were tested for deficiencies in pre-pulse inhibition. Adult mice from both groups were sacrificed and frontal cortices were dissected for total RNA extraction.
Data set of adult mouse frontal cortex from control and from Maternal Immune Activation (MIA). This set observes the effect of in utero exposure to inflammatory signals deriving from infecting a pregnant female as a model for schizophrenia.
Data will be made available at a time to be determined.
E-MTAB-1030 - mRNA Sequencing of STG in schizophrenia
Molecular and Cell Biology is taught with a laboratory section to 50 students a semester. Students progress in learning the details of the Central Dogma with a focus on differential gene expression analysis towards the second half of the semester. Students mine the data from RNA-Seq experiments and design primers where they subsequently perform qPCR to validate expression levels. This serves as a starting point for them to continue working with the data later on in the curriculum as they progress to higher level bioinformatics courses.