Cardiac Sex Differences in the Transcriptome of C57 Male and Female Adult Hearts

Purpose: The goals of this study are to compare adult male and female C57 mouse hearts transcriptome profiling (RNA-seq) to conclude cardiac sex differences at the mRNA level. Methods: mRNA profiles of adult male and female C57 mouse hearts were generated by deep sequencing, n=4 for each sex, using Illumina HiSeq2500. The sequence reads that passed quality filters were analyzed at the transcript isoform level with two methods: Burrows–Wheeler Aligner (BWA) followed by ANOVA (ANOVA) and TopHat followed by Cufflinks. Results: Using an optimized data analysis workflow, we mapped about 50 million sequence reads per sample to the mouse genome (build mm10) and identified 16,160 transcripts in the mouse hearts. Overall design: Adult male and female C57 mouse hearts RNAseq