RNA-seq transcriptomes of term not in labour and term in labour human myometrial tissue

Purpose: To chart the human myometrial transcriptomes before and after the onset of labour. Methods: Tophat splice junction mapping of paired-end reads, HTSeq to generate counts, cufflinks to track transcripts, DESeq, edgeR and baySeq to detect differentially expressed genes and principal component analysis for clustering analyses. Results: We mapped on average 14 million paired-end reads per sample (counting each end individually) to the human genome (build hg19) and covered the expressed transcriptome about 13 times with a TopHat-HTSeq workflow. We performed a comparative analysis with an analogous microarray study (Mittal et al., 2010) and found some overlap between the RNA-seq and the microarray data. Conclusions: Our study is the first RNA-seq study of the human myometrium before and after the onset of labour. We show that while microarray and RNA-seq studies may complement each other, RNA-seq has a much greater resolution. At term with and at term without labour human myometrial mRNA profiles were generated by deep sequencing, using Illumina GAIIx (five biological replicates each).