A comparative analysis of the transcriptome profiles of liver and muscle tissue in pigs divergent for feed efficiency

The aim of this experiment was to identify changes in gene expression in muscle and liver between pigs that were divergent in feed efficiency. The animals were selected from two different farms of origin. 48 animals were utilized in this study. Following slaughter RNA Total RNA was extracted from liver and muscle ((25 mg) tissue using Trizol Reagent (Sigma-Aldrich, Arklow, Ireland) according to the manufacturer's instructions, the crude RNA extract was further purified using the GenElute Mammalian Total RNA Miniprep Kit (RTN70, Sigma-Aldrich). Library construction and sequencing was performed by the next generation sequencing facility at the Institute of Molecular Medicine, University of Leeds, United Kingdom. The RNA-seq libraries were constructed using the Illumina TruSeq RNA Sample Preparation Kit v2 (Illumina, San Diego, CA) per the manufacturer's instructions. One hundred base paired-end sequencing was run on an Illumina HiSeq2000 platform with each pool ran on two lanes on a flow cell.