Abstract:

In order to study the expression and regulation effects of estrogen receptor-β (ERβ) in the development of mouse embryo, the primer of ERβ was designed, the ERβ fragment was first obtained by RT-PCR and subcloned into plasmids
pGEM- 3Z, then the recombinant plasmids were linearized with the restriction enzymes of EcoRⅠand HindⅢ. Using Sp6
and T7 RNA polymerase, the digoxigenin(dig) labeled sense and anti-sense probes were transcriped in vitro, respectively. Then the expression of ERβ in mouse embryo was examined with the probes by whole-mount in situ hybridization. The results indicated that ERβ is expressed in the brain, spinal neural tube, genital ridge, pericardium, limb bud and mandibular arch of 10.5 dpc embryo, and is also expressed in the telencephalon, mesencephalon, medulla oblongata, spinal cord and
limb bud of 13.5 dpc embryo. These results suggest that ERβ maybe play a role of regulation in sexual differentiation, pri-mal differentiation of neural tube, further differentiation of three primary cerebral vesicles and spinal cord, generation and differentiation of bone and cartilage of limb bud, development of pericardium and configuration differentiation of mandibu-lar in mouse embryo.