SRA

The rat has been used extensively as a model for evaluating chemical toxicities and for understanding drug mechanisms. However, its transcriptome across multiple organs, or developmental stages, has not yet been reported. Here we show, as part of the SEQC consortium efforts, a comprehensive rat transcriptomic BodyMap created by performing RNASeq on 320 samples from 11 organs of both sexes of juvenile, adolescent, adult and aged Fischer 344 rats. We catalogue the expression profiles of 40,064 genes, 65,167 transcripts, 31,909 alternatively spliced transcript variants and 2,367 non-coding genes/non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) annotated in AceView. We find that organ-enriched, differentially expressed genes reflect the known organ-specific biological activities. A large number of transcripts show organ-specific, age-dependent or sex-specific differential expression patterns. We create a web-based, open-access rat BodyMap database of expression profiles with crosslinks to other widely used databases, anticipating that it will serve as a primary resource for biomedical research using the rat model. Overall design: We constructed a comprehensive RNA-Seq data set for studying the dynamics of the rat transcriptome using 320 RNA samples isolated from 11 organs (adrenal gland, brain, heart, kidney, liver, lung, muscle, spleen, thymus, and testes or uterus) from both sexes of Fischer 344 rats across four developmental stages (2-, 6-, 21-, and 104-weeks-old). Four biological replicates were used for each of the 80 sample groups.