Homo sapiens Transcriptome or Gene expression

Single 4 mm punch biopsies were obtained from lesional forearm skin of four patients with early, diffuse SSc within 6 months of first onset of non-Raynaud's symptoms, and normal skin of four controls without disease. Total RNA was extracted from skin biopsies using QIAgen RNeasy Plus Mini kit. Ribosomal RNA was depleted from the large RNA fraction using Invitrogen Ribominus kit. RNA-Seq library was synthesized by NuGen Ovation RNA-Seq System v2 using cDNA prepared by random hexamer priming. Libraries were multiplexed and sequenced on an Illumina HiSeq 2000 platform and 187-242 million 50 bp paired-end reads were obtained per sample.