Identification of Natural Antisense Transcripts in Mouse Brain and Their Association with Autism Spectrum Disorder Risk Genes

We performed strand-specific, deep RNA sequencing to profile expression of sense and antisense reads with a focus on 100 ASD-related genes in medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and striatum across mouse development (P7, P14 and P56). Using de novo transcriptome assembly, we generated a comprehensive long non-coding RNA (lncRNA) transcriptome. We conducted BLAST analyses to compare the resultant transcripts with the human genome and identified transcripts with high sequence similarity and coverage. Strand specific deep RNA sequencing of medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and striatum across mouse development.