Gene expression profiling of the olfactory tissues from sex-separated and sex-combined female and male mice

We sought to investigate the scope of cellular and molecular changes within a mouse's olfactory system as a function of its exposure to odors emitted from members of the opposite sex. To this end, we housed mice either separated from members of the opposite sex (sex-separated) or together with members of the opposite sex (sex-combined) until six months of age and then profiled transcript levels within the main olfactory epithelium (MOE), vomeronasal organ (VNO), and olfactory bulb (OB) of the mice via RNA-seq. For each tissue type, we then analyzed gene expression differences between sex-separated males and sex-separated females (SM v SF), sex-combined males and sex-combined females (CM v CF), sex-separated females and sex-combined females (SF v CF), and sex-separated males and sex-combined males (SM v CM). Within both the MOE and VNO, we observed significantly more numerous gene expression differences between males and females when mice were sex-separated as compared to sex-combined. Chemoreceptors were highly enriched among the genes differentially expressed between males and females in sex-separated conditions, and these expression differences were found to reflect differences in the abundance of the corresponding sensory neurons. Overall design: For each combination of tissue (MOE, VNO, OB), sex (F, M), and condition (sex-separated [S], sex-combined [C]), we generated three biological replicate samples of RNA, each of which contained equal quantities of RNA from two different mice. This resulted in a total of 36 samples.

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van der Linden C, Jakob S, Gupta P, Dulac C, Santoro SW