Analysis of human, chimpanzee, macaque and mouse tissue transcriptomes using Next Generation Sequencing

We performed deep strand-specific sequencing of poly-adenylated RNA (polyA+ RNAseq) from human, chimpanzee, macaque and mouse tissues, with the goal of detecting numerous non-annotated poorly expressed and antisense genes. We identified thousands of annotated and novel genes, especially in testis. We discovered that ~2% of the human and chimpanzee multiexonic genes were specific from such species. We generated RNA-Seq data (∼2.10 billion paired-end reads, 25-100 bp length) for the polyadenylated RNA fraction of brain (cerebral cortex), heart, liver and testis. In human and chimpanzee, we generated 2 samples per tissue corresponding to different individuals. In macaque, only 1 sample per tissue was generated. In mouse, considered as the evolutionary outgroup, we generated three pools of brain samples, and one pool of heart, liver and testis samples. We generated an additional sample in Testis without including reverse transcriptase as a control of DNA contamination.