Whole transcriptome profiling of rat pineal glands and retinas collected throughout a 24-hour cycle

The rat pineal transcriptome is highly dynamic, with many hundreds of transcripts changing more than two-fold on a 24-hr basis, as revealed earlier using Affymetrix GeneChip analysis. The retina is evolutionally related to the pineal gland so these two tissues share many gene expression patterns. This study more completely characterizes the temporally dynamic transcriptomes of these tissues using RNA-Seq to capture information regarding alternative splicing, novel exons, unannotated mRNAs, non-coding RNAs, and coding transcripts not represented on the Affymetrix chips. We also identified transcripts that were selectively expressed in the pineal gland relative to other tissues by comparing pineal samples to a sample of pooled non-pineal tissues.