I incubated the eggs in two different environments, normoxic (21% oxygen) and hypoxic (14% oxygen). I sampled the fetuses after 15 and 19 days. Labeled RNA was hybridized to Affymetrix Chicken Genome Arrays. The affymetrix chip was used to detect the potentially differentially expressed mRNA . Normalized microarray results were then analyzed to isolate differentially expressed probes. This array contains 32,773 transcripts corresponding to more than 28,000 chicken genes.

Afterwards, I isolated total RNA from another set of fetuses incubated in the same conditions as the microarray group and used it to perform a qPCR in order to verify the microarray results. The qPCR was performed in the Rotor-GeneTM 6000 (Corbett Life Science) and results analysed using the Relative Expression Software Tool (REST) program.