RNA-Seq results of four Chinese cattle from longissimus muscles based on Illumina HiSeq 2000 platform

Purpose: The goals of this study are to identify the molecular mechanism by which NA improves meat quality and find differentially expressed genes in longissimus muscles between cattle treated with/without dietary NA. Methods: gene expression profiles of longissimus muscle from 4 cattle mRNA pools including 6 control and 6 NA treated cattle were generated by single-end sequencing (50 bp), using Illumina HiSeq™ 2000. The sequence reads that passed quality control were analyzed at the transcript isoform level with TopHat followed by Cufflinks. Results: Using SOAPaligner (V2.21) analysis, we mapped about 23,359,272-25,165,811 clean reads per sample to the bovine reference genome assembly (unmasked genomic DNA sequences: Bos_taurus.UMD3.1.75.dna.chromosome.1-29 and X) (ftp://ftp.ensembl.org/pub/release-75/fasta/bos_taurus/dna/). Our NOISeq analysis identified a list of 124 differentially expressed genes with a probability value = 0.8 and an absolute value of log2 Ratio of NA to Control = 1. Conclusions: In our study, dietary NA increases the IMF content of longissimus muscle may through up-regulating the expressions of genes and pathways related to lipid metabolism. Overall design: Four mRNA profiles of 6 control and 6 NA treated cattle were generated by single-end sequencing (50 bp), using Illumina HiSeq™ 2000.