Micro RNA in serum of cows

MicroRNA is a potential regulator of health conditions of cows. And feeds are believed to affect the frequency of miRNAs in plasma. These sample is miRNA extracted from plasma of twin cows (25 months aged) fed with grains or grasses. The twin cows were derived from embryos produced with a semen and oocytes of the same cow. The calves were raised under the same condition until 8 month in age but fed with timothy and silage (grass fed) or grains (Corn, Wheat, grain fed) for 17 months, at which time point, their weights were 510kg for grass fed and 830kg for grain fed. Blood was collected from a vein and exosome RNA in the serum were extracted using a SeraMir Exosome RNA Amplification Kit (System Biosciences). RNA quality and concentration were examined using a Bioanalyzer (Agilent technologies, Palo Alto, CA, USA); a cDNA library was constructed using an Illumina TruSeq Small RNA Library Preparation Kit (Illumina, San Diego, CA, USA) for RNA from FFs. Clusters were generated on a cBot (Illumina), and one lane of the multiplied samples was sequenced as 75 bp reads (single read) on the NextSeq (Illumina). Image analysis, base calling and quality filtering were performed using the bcl2fastq2 v2.18.0.12 (Illumina) following the manufacturer's instructions. Sequence data were filtered to discard the adapter sequence, ambiguous nucleotides and low-quality sequences. The remaining sequence data were aligned to the Bos Taurus genome sequence (ARS-UCD1.2/bosTau9) to count sequence reads.