Transactions of the Twenty-Sixth Annual Meeting of the Society for Maternal-Fetal MedicineThe transcriptome of the uterine cervix before and after spontaneous term parturition
Section snippets
Study design
A cross-sectional study was performed in patients undergoing elective cesarean section with an unripe cervix (TNL) as well as patients after spontaneous vaginal delivery (TL). The criteria for inclusion were: (1) term gestation (≥37 weeks); (2) no prostaglandin or oxytocin administration; (3) absence of histological chorioamnionitis by examination of the placenta; (4) negative Neisseriae gonorrhea and Chlamydia trachomatis cervical cultures; and (5) normal Papanicolaou smear.
Patients underwent
Results
Microarray analysis was performed on cervical biopsy specimens obtained from 7 patients in the TNL group and 9 patients in the TL group. Clinical characteristics of the patients are described in Table I. Discriminant analysis demonstrated 1192 differentially expressed genes in the cervical biopsies of women who underwent spontaneous labor at term versus those not in labor. A list of the top 50 differentially expressed probe sets is presented in Table II. Hierarchical clustering of the
Comment
Principal findings of the study included the following: (1) the cervical transcriptome of patients after labor was dramatically different (1192 unique genes differentially expressed) from that of those not in labor (false discovery rate < 0.05, absolute fold change > 2); (2) a stereotypic gene expression pattern was observed in cervical tissue after spontaneous vaginal delivery; (3) Gene Ontology analysis indicated multiple “Biological Process” categories were enriched, including “response to
Acknowledgments
We thank Dr. Susan Land, Dan Lott, and Sarah McNorton at the Applied Genomics Technology Center of Wayne State University for the performing the qRT-PCR reactions. We thank Dr. Wendell Jones for critical comments on the manuscript.
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Cited by (0)
Supported by a Women's Reproductive Health Research Scholar (to S.S.H.) whose research is sponsored by a grant from the National Institutes of Health/National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Grant 2K12HD01254-06.
Presented at the 26th Annual Meeting of the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine, January 30 through February 4, 2006, Miami, FL.
Reprints not available from the authors. Address correspondence to Sonia S. Hassan, MD, Hutzel Women's Hospital, Division of Maternal-Fetal Medicine, Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, 3990 John R, Mailbox #4, Detroit, MI 48201.