Sex determines the expression level of one third of the actively expressed genes in bovine blastocysts

Although genetically identical for autosomal Chrs (Chr), male and female preimplantation embryos could display sex-specific transcriptional regulation. To illustrate sex-specific differences at the mRNA level, we compared gene-expression patterns between male and female blastocysts by DNA microarray comparison of nine groups of 60 bovine in vitro-produced blastocysts of each sex. Almost one-third of the transcripts detected showed sexual dimorphism (2,921 transcripts; false-discovery rate, P < 0.05), suggesting that in the absence of hormonal influences, the sex Chrs impose an extensive transcriptional regulation upon autosomal genes. Six genes were analyzed by qPCR in in vivo-derived embryos, which displayed similar sexual dimorphism. Ontology analysis suggested a higher global transcriptional level in females and a more active protein metabolism in males. A gene homolog to an X-linked gene involved in network interactions during spliceosome assembly was found in the Y-Chr. Most of the X-linked-expressed transcripts (88.5%) were up-regulated in females, but most of them (70%) exhibited fold-changes lower than 1.6, suggesting that X-Chr inactivation is partially achieved at the blastocyst stage. Almost half of the transcripts up-regulated in female embryos exhibiting more than 1.6-fold change were present in the X-Chr and eight of them were selected to determine a putative paternal imprinting by gene expression comparison with parthenogenetic embryos. Five (BEX, CAPN6, BEX2, SRPX2, and UBE2A) exhibited a higher expression in females than in parthenotes, suggesting that they are predominantly expressed by the paternal inherited X-Chr and that imprinting may increase the transcriptional skew caused by double X-Chr dosage.