A catalogue of novel bovine long noncoding RNA across 18 tissues

PLoS One. 2015 Oct 23;10(10):e0141225. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0141225. eCollection 2015.

Abstract

Long non-coding RNA (lncRNA) have been implicated in diverse biological roles including gene regulation and genomic imprinting. Identifying lncRNA in bovine across many differing tissue would contribute to the current repertoire of bovine lncRNA, and help further improve our understanding of the evolutionary importance and constraints of these transcripts. Additionally, it could aid in identifying sites in the genome outside of protein coding genes where mutations could contribute to variation in complex traits. This is particularly important in bovine as genomic predictions are increasingly used in genetic improvement for milk and meat production. Our aim was to identify and annotate novel long non coding RNA transcripts in the bovine genome captured from RNA Sequencing (RNA-Seq) data across 18 tissues, sampled in triplicate from a single cow. To address the main challenge in identifying lncRNA, namely distinguishing lncRNA transcripts from unannotated genes and protein coding genes, a lncRNA identification pipeline with a number of filtering steps was developed. A total of 9,778 transcripts passed the filtering pipeline. The bovine lncRNA catalogue includes MALAT1 and HOTAIR, both of which have been well described in human and mouse genomes. We attempted to validate the lncRNA in libraries from three additional cows. 726 (87.47%) liver and 1,668 (55.27%) blood class 3 lncRNA were validated with stranded liver and blood libraries respectively. Additionally, this study identified a large number of novel unknown transcripts in the bovine genome with high protein coding potential, illustrating a clear need for better annotations of protein coding genes.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Animals
  • Cattle
  • Expressed Sequence Tags
  • Female
  • Humans
  • Mice
  • Molecular Sequence Annotation
  • Organ Specificity
  • RNA, Long Noncoding / genetics*
  • RNA, Long Noncoding / metabolism
  • Transcriptome

Substances

  • RNA, Long Noncoding

Grants and funding

We would like to thank the Australian federally funded Dairy Futures CRC (www.dairyfuturescrc.com.au/) for their support and funding for this project for LTK. Dairy Futures CRC provides a scholarship for the author LTK with the author BJH being the supervisor of student LTK. All other authors except YPPC are also affiliated with the funder. The funder provided support in the form of a scholarship for author LTK, but did not have any additional role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The specific roles of these authors are articulated in the ‘author contributions’ section.