tRNA quantification of five human cell lines by hydro-tRNAseq and small RNA-seq

We analyze whether tRNA quantifications based on small RNA-seq data are informative enough to distinguish between different human cell lines covering multiple tissue types. We therefore apply both small RNA-seq and Hydro-tRNAseq to HEK293 (kidney), HCT116 (colon), HeLa (cervix), MDA-MB-231 (breast), and BJ fibroblasts. First, the correlations between the two methods of identical samples and computational mapping pipeline range between 0.93 and 0.96 for all cell lines. tRNA quantifications from both protocols are compared and significantly higher Spearman correlations are obtained within matching samples versus mismatching cell lines. In consequence, we demonstrate that small RNA-seq quantifications of sample-specific tRNA profiles show a good agreement with conventional tRNA-seq. This study contains 30 samples. Three replicates for each of the five cell lines. For HCT116, BJ fibroblasts and MDA-MB-232, both hydro-tRNAseq and small RNA-seq are determined. For HEK293 and HELA, the hydro-tRNAseq raw files have already been published (ArrayExpress under accession number E-MTAB-8144).