Differential gene expression in blastocysts following pronuclear transfer
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Evolutionary Studies, Genetics, Genomics, Evidence Based Medicine, Statistics
- Keywords
- evidence based medicine, mitochondrial replacement, mitochondrial donation, power analysis, differential gene expression, mitochondrial disease
- Copyright
- © 2016 Morrow et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2016. Differential gene expression in blastocysts following pronuclear transfer. PeerJ Preprints 4:e2412v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.2412v1
Abstract
Nuclear transfer techniques (a.k.a. mitochondrial replacement therapies) are currently under development to provide a route to eliminating particular instances of mitochondrial disease from the germline. Before these kinds of techniques are implemented clinically it is of primary concern that their safety and efficacy is established. In a recent paper, Hyslop et al (2016) utilized a specific version of pronuclear transfer (PNT) to investigate the consequences for gene expression in the developing embryo, which may indicate whether or not developmental pathways have been perturbed. However, the study was only able to include a small number of blastocysts within each treatment group, although a larger number of single cell expression profiles from each blastocyst were acquired. Using simulated datasets we show that the size and experimental design of this study cannot provide conclusive evidence that expression profiles of manipulated or control samples are indistinguishable from one another due to low power.
Author Comment
This is a preprint submission to PeerJ Preprints.