TY  - JOUR
A1  - Rice, Edward S.
A1  - Kohno, Satomi
A1  - John, John St.
A1  - Pham, Son
A1  - Howard, Jonathan
A1  - Lareau, Liana F.
A1  - O'Connell, Brendan L.
A1  - Hickey, Glenn
A1  - Armstrong, Joel
A1  - Deran, Alden
A1  - Fiddes, Ian
A1  - Platt, Roy N.
A1  - Gresham, Cathy
A1  - McCarthy, Fiona
A1  - Kern, Colin
A1  - Haan, David
A1  - Phan, Tan
A1  - Schmidt, Carl
A1  - Sanford, Jeremy R.
A1  - Ray, David A.
A1  - Paten, Benedict
A1  - Guillette, Louis J.
A1  - Green, Richard E.
T1  - Improved genome assembly of American alligator genome reveals conserved architecture of estrogen signaling
Y1  - 2017/05/01 
JF  - Genome Research 
JO  - Genome Research 
SP  - 686 
EP  - 696 
DO  - 10.1101/gr.213595.116 
VL  - 27 
IS  - 5 
UR  - http://genome.cshlp.org/content/27/5/686.abstract 
N2  - The American alligator, Alligator mississippiensis, like all crocodilians, has temperature-dependent sex determination, in which the sex of an embryo is determined by the incubation temperature of the egg during a critical period of development. The lack of genetic differences between male and female alligators leaves open the question of how the genes responsible for sex determination and differentiation are regulated. Insight into this question comes from the fact that exposing an embryo incubated at male-producing temperature to estrogen causes it to develop ovaries. Because estrogen response elements are known to regulate genes over long distances, a contiguous genome assembly is crucial for predicting and understanding their impact. We present an improved assembly of the American alligator genome, scaffolded with in vitro proximity ligation (Chicago) data. We use this assembly to scaffold two other crocodilian genomes based on synteny. We perform RNA sequencing of tissues from American alligator embryos to find genes that are differentially expressed between embryos incubated at male- versus female-producing temperature. Finally, we use the improved contiguity of our assembly along with the current model of CTCF-mediated chromatin looping to predict regions of the genome likely to contain estrogen-responsive genes. We find that these regions are significantly enriched for genes with female-biased expression in developing gonads after the critical period during which sex is determined by incubation temperature. We thus conclude that estrogen signaling is a major driver of female-biased gene expression in the post-temperature sensitive period gonads. 
ER  -