Gene expression in sheep skin and wool (hair)

We sequenced 2939 ESTs from fetal and adult sheep skin. Stages of gestation were picked to coincide with the major events in skin appendage (wool follicle) formation. Clustering analysis generated a nonredundant set of ESTs 2435 strong (83% nonredundant). Approximately 24% of these gave no hit to NCBI build 29 of the human genome, while 35% were tentatively classified by putative function based on BLASTX hits with a p(N) of <10(-4). In addition to bioinformatics analysis of our ESTs and gene mapping, we have generated a large EST spatial expression data set using in situ hybridization. One thousand one hundred forty-two ESTs have been used for in situ localization; about 31% are from adult sheep skin, 39% from late gestation fetal sheep skin, and 30% from midgestation fetal sheep skin. These probes have been used in over 3000 hybridization experiments. In this report, we summarize the results of in situs on adult sheep skin.