FAANG Transcriptome Analysis of the horse

The Functional Annotation of the Animal Genome (FAANG) project aims to identify functional regulatory elements in animal genomes in both sexes and across multiple stages of development. For the horse, a biobank of tissues and cells was created, which includes 80 tissues and three cell types from two adult mares. Last year, we reported on the creation of this biobank to be used by the equine community in the functional annotation of the genome in accordance with FAANG Consortium guidelines. Since the Plant and Animal Genome conference in January of 2017, the FAANG biobank was used in the generation of 7 different datasets. In collaboration with the equine genetics community, Reduced Representation Bisulfite sequencing, Microbiome sequencing, and Chromatin Immunoprecipitation sequencing have been conducted. In addition, to date, RNA has been isolated from 34 tissues of both biobank mares using Trizol(r) chloroform phase separation and clean up via Zymo Research columns. Extracted RNA had an average RIN score of 8.2 prior to stranded library preparation. mRNA was sequenced on the Illumina HiSeq 4000. Data are publically available and linked to the phenotype information within the FAANG database. Analysis of the RNA-seq data is ongoing to determine specific signatures of each tissue type.