Sheep gene expression microarray

All animals were treated in accordance with the animal protocols defined by national and local animal welfare bodies, and all animal work was approved by the Shandong Province Biological Studies Animal Care and Use Committee.
Sampling methods were described previously [25 (link),26 ]. One ram and two ewes of 16-month-old Aohan fine wool sheep were used in the microarray study. These animals were half sibs (sharing the same father). In December 2010, two areas of full-thickness skin were sampled from the same animal under local anaesthesia: body side skin (wool bearing) and groin skin (non-wool bearing) for microarray and proteomic experiments. The area of each sample was about 1 cm². All samples were immediately put into collection tubes and stored in liquid nitrogen for RNA and protein extraction. A total of 15, 208 probes were spotted on this Agilent Sheep Gene Expression Microarray (Santa Clara, CA, USA).

Animal handling was performed according to the animal protocols defined by national and local animal welfare bodies. All animal work was approved by the Shandong Province Biological Studies Animal Care and Use Committee^{28 (link)}.
In August 2010, one male and two female sheep of the Aohan fine wooland small tail Han sheep (one-year-old) breeds respectively, were used in this study. Animals from each breed were half siblingssharing the same male parent. Full-thickness whole skin (including epidermis and dermis) was sampled from the body side skin(more wool growing) of these six animal sunder local anesthesia. These samples were used for both transcriptome and proteome analysis. The skin area sampled was approximately 1 cm². After removal, all samples were immediately stored in liquid nitrogen for RNA and protein extraction^{28 (link)}. A total of 15, 208 probes encoding proteins were spotted on this Agilent Sheep Gene Expression Microarray (Santa Clara, CA, USA)^{28 (link)}.