PARENT SESSION
Implantation & Early Development

GLOBAL GENE EXPRESSION ANALYSIS TO IDENTIFY MOLECULAR MARKERS OF UTERINE RECEPTIVITY AND EMBRYO IMPLANTATION.

Reese, Jeff¹, Das, Sanjoy^2,3, Paria, Bibhash^1,3, Lim, Hyunjung³, Song, Haengseok³, Matsumoto, Hiromichi³, Zhao, Xuemei³, Tan, Jian³, Brown, Naoko¹, Knudtson, Kevin⁴, DuBois, Raymond⁵, Dey, Sudhansu³, ^{1 2 3 4 5}

ABSTRACT- Infertility and spontaneous pregnancy losses are an enduring problem to women's health. The establishment of pregnancy depends on successful implantation. Although a number of genes and their products have been implicated in embryo-uterine interactions during implantation, only a small number of them are critical to this process. To obtain a global view and identify novel pathways of implantation, we used a dual screening strategy to analyze the expression of 12,588 mouse genes by microarray analysis. Comparison of implantation and interimplantation sites revealed that while expression of 178 genes were upregulated, the expression of 201 genes were downregulated at the implantation site. We further compared the gene expression profile in progesterone-primed uteri of pregnant mice with delayed implantation to that of mice in which delayed implantation was terminated by estrogen. The results show upregulation of 440 genes and downregulation of 151 genes in uteri after induction of implantation. Comparative analysis of these two sets of experiments showed specific alteration of 19 known genes and 19 ESTs around the time of implantation. Collectively, we identified genes with recognized roles in implantation, genes with potential roles in this process and genes whose functions have yet to be defined in this event. The identification of unique genetic markers for the onset of implantation signifies that genome-wide analysis coupled with functional assays is a promising approach to resolve the molecular pathways of implantation.

KEY WORDS: Implantation, delayed implantation, gene array