Reproduction Abstracts

One of our major goals is to identify therapeutics and translate our finding to the clinical setting. Over the past few years, we have been focusing on two epithelial specific genes, CDH1 and WNT7A. CDH1 is a transmembrane glycoprotein, belonging to the cadherin superfamily of cell adhesion molecules. When we conditionally delete Cdh1 in the mouse uterus, infertility results due to disorganized cellular structure of the epithelium and ablation of end...

The reproductive homeobox X-linked, Rhox, genes encode transcription factors that are expressed selectively in reproductive tissues. While there are 33 testis-expressed Rhox genes in mice, only Rhox5 and Rhox8 are produced by Sertoli cells, suggesting that they alone regulate somatic-cell gene products crucial for germ-cell development. We used the Rhox5 promoter to drive tissue-specific RNAi to knockdown (KD) RHOX8 in vivo...