An abundance of ubiquitously expressed genes revealed by tissue transcriptome sequence data.

ABSTRACT: The parts of the genome transcribed by a cell or tissue reflect the biological processes and functions it carries out. We characterized the features of mammalian tissue transcriptomes at the gene level through analysis of RNA deep sequencing (RNA-Seq) data across human and mouse tissues and cell lines. We observed that roughly 8,000 protein-coding genes were ubiquitously expressed, contributing to around 75% of all mRNAs by message copy number in most tissues. These mRNAs encoded proteins that were often intracellular, and tended to be involved in metabolism, transcription, RNA processing or translation. In contrast, genes for secreted or plasma membrane proteins were generally expressed in only a subset of tissues. The distribution of expression levels was broad but fairly continuous: no

SUBMITTER: Ramskold D 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2781110 | biostudies-literature | 2009 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature