141 EXPRESSION OF GENE PRODUCTS ENCODING CNN PROTEINS DURING THE FIRST WEEK OF DEVELOPMENT
Bibliographic record
Abstract
CCNs (cysteine-rich 61 (Cyr61), connective tissue growth factor (CTGF), and nephroblastoma overexpressed (Nov)) are a newly characterized gene family encoding 30-40 kDa proteins that are cysteine-rich and associated with the extracellular matrix. CCNs bind integrins and activate intracellular signaling, resulting in kinase activation and gene transcription. They are involved in events essential to development, including implantation and placentation. For example, CTGF is increased during decidualization and both CTGF and Cyr61 are produced by trophoblast giant cells. Furthermore, Cyr61-null mice display early embryonic lethality due to placental defects. Although CTGF protein has been reported in mouse 4.5-day embryo, no studies to date have focused on defining the expression of CCN mRNAs during pre-implantation development. The objective of this study was to characterize the expression of CCN mRNAs during the first week of in vivo mouse and in vitro cow development. CD-1 mice were superovulated by i.p. injection of pregnant mare serum gonadotrophin (10 U) and human chorionic gonadotrophin (10 U) 22 hours later. Following mating of the mice with CD-1 males, embryos were flushed from oviducts and uteri at 2-cell, 4-cell, 8-cell, morula, and blastocyst stages. Cow oocytes were obtained from slaughterhouse ovaries. Cow embryos were produced by aspiration of early antral follicles followed by in vitro oocyte maturation, fertilization, and embryo culture methods, and collected at 2-5-cell, 6-8-cell, morula, and blastocyst stages. Groups of five embryos of each stage were pooled for mRNA extraction using a magnetic bead protocol. Reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction was used to detect CCN mRNAs at each time point, and product identity was verified by sequencing. CCN mRNAs are detectable during the first week of development in both species. In the mouse, Cyr61 mRNAs were present in all embryo stages investigated. CTGF mRNAs were variable at the 2-cell stage, but were consistently present from the 4-cell stage to the blastocyst stage. Interestingly, Nov appeared transiently at the 4- to 8-cell stage only. In the cow, CTGF and Cyr61 mRNAs were also detectable. Nov was undetectable in the cow. This is the first report of CCN mRNA expression in mouse or cow pre-implantation development. The early appearance and continued presence of Cyr61 and CTGF indicate a specific role in early development. The transient nature of Nov expression may indicate a specific role during compaction in the mouse. The expression of CTGF and Cyr61 in the cow indicates that these proteins are conserved between species and supports the hypothesis that they are important in this early phase of development. This research was funded by NSERC, Canada.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".