Abstract
In biomedical research, understanding the differences between males and females is essential for understanding diseases that affect one sex more than the other. This study focused on gene expression and regulation differences between male and female mouse brains during development. We found that many microRNAs, small molecules that play a role in development were expressed differently between male and female brains. These differences could be important in understanding why males and females develop differently, particularly regarding neurodevelopmental disorders like ADHD, schizophrenia, and autism. We also found that some microRNAs that differed between males and females were located near genes associated with these disorders. Overall, the study highlights the importance of understanding sex differences in molecular biology research and provides insights into potential genes and pathways of interest for further study.
Understanding how sex chromosomes and hormones affect disease-causing mechanisms will illuminate the mechanisms underlying predominantly idiopathic sex-biased neurodevelopmental disorders, such as ADHD, schizophrenia, and autism.
We demonstrated robust sex differences for some genes and miRNAs expressed in the embryonic mouse brain.
This is the first study to use high-throughput sequencing to capture traditional RNA-seq data in parallel with small RNA-seq data, which allowed us to gain new insights into how sex differences in miRNA and mRNA targets interact.
Sex-biased genes, miRNAs, and pathways in which they act are known to be involved in neurodevelopmental processes, emphasizing the importance of RNA in establishing sex differences in the prenatal mouse brain.