Altered apoptosis/autophagy and epigenetic modifications cause the impaired postimplantation octaploid embryonic development in mice.

Polyploids are pervasive in plants and have large impacts on crop breeding, but natural polyploids are rare in animals. Mouse diploid embryos can be induced to become tetraploid by blastomere fusion at the 2-cell stage and tetraploid embryos can develop to the blastocyst stage in vitro. However, there is little information regarding mouse octaploid embryonic development and precise mechanisms contributing to octaploid embryonic developmental limitations are unknown.

[Reviews in comparative genomic research based on orthologs].

The orthologs have similar or even identical functions in different species, share the anological regulatory pathways, and play the close or even same role among species. Furthermore, the vast majority of the biological core functions were assumed to a considerable number of orthologous genes in organisms. Orthologs was the most reliable choices for functional annotation and analysis of genomic sequences, whose unique biological characteristics demonstrated that comparative genomics research based on orthologs will certainly provide clues for detecting the origin, expression, and loss of important functional genes during the biological evolution in different organisms.