EST-based analysis of gene expression in the porcine brain

Since pig is an important livestock species worldwide, its gene expression has been investigated intensively, but rarely in brain. In order to study gene expression profiles in the pig central nervous system, we sequenced and analyzed 43,122 high-quality 5' end expressed sequence tags (ESTs) from porcine cerebellum, cortex cerebrum, and brain stem cDNA libraries, involving several different prenatal and postnatal developmental stages. The initial ESTs were assembled into 16,101 clusters and compared to protein and nucleic acid databases in GenBank. Of these sequences, 30.6% clusters matched protein databases and represented function known sequences; 75.1% had significant hits to nucleic acid databases and partial represented known function; 73.3% matched known porcine ESTs; and 21.5% had no matches to any known sequences in GenBank. We used the categories defined by the Gene Ontology to survey gene expression in the porcine brain.