A comprehensive view of the transcriptome during development of the mouse cerebral cortex

The complexity of the mature adult brain is a result of both developmental processes and experience-dependent circuit formation. One way to look at the process of brain development is to examine gene expression changes, and previous studies have used microarrays to address this in a global manner. However, the transcriptome is more complex than gene expression levels alone, as both alternative splicing and RNA editing occur to generate a more diverse set of mature transcripts. The aim of the current study was to develop a high-resolution transcriptome dataset of mouse cortical development using RNA sequencing (RNA-Seq), thus assaying exon usage and RNA editing as well as overcoming some of the inherent limitations of microarrays. We found a large number of differentially expressed genes, but also altered splicing and RNA editing between embryonic and adult cerebral cortex. Each dataset was validated both technically and biologically, and in each case tested we found our RNA-Seq observations to have high predictive validity. We propose this dataset, and the accompanying analysis, to be a helpful resource in the understanding of changes in gene expression during development. Three young adult cerebral cortices four embryonic cerebral cortices