longissimus dorsi muscle transcriptome in sheep twins under different feed regimes

To compare the transcriptomes from twin sheep fed with two different feeds, we utilized an Illumina Hi-Seq 2500 to sequence eight longissimus dorsi muscle samples, and generated 22.5 to 28.5 million 125-bp clean paired-end reads. The Trinity software was used to reconstruct a reference transcriptome using obtained RNA-seq reads. This reference transcriptome contained 347335 transcripts with an average length of 2166.29 bp. The expression values of transcripts of the eight samples were calculated by RSEM, whereas the edgeR package in R was used to analyze differentially expressed genes (DEGs) between twin lambs under different diets. Transcriptome analysis of the muscle revealed that the genes related to glucose metabolic processes and fatty acid biosynthesis were significantly differentially expressed between the two groups.