Characterization of expressed sequence tags from turkey skeletal muscle

This study was designed to identify important muscle gene homologues in the turkey. Three skeletal muscle cDNA libraries representing distinct muscle developmental stages were constructed. A total of 20,042 clones were sequenced resulting in 13,023 finished high-quality sequences (trimmed, quality scored and masked) for analysis. Sequence clustering produced 1113 contigs and 4144 singletons (5257 putative transcripts). Sequences were compared by blastn to the chicken whole-genome sequence and to the Ensembl and NCBI databases to identify homologous sequences. These surveys indicated that most of the important muscle genes are included in the sequence collection. Examination of contigs identified 1288 single nucleotide polymorphisms and in 320 of those the minor allele was observed to be present in more than one sequence. This resource provides sequence variants for numerous genes in the turkey, as demonstrated by the SNP haplotypes that were constructed for 10 genes. Sequences obtained in this study provide the basis for constructing a skeletal muscle-focused microarray, a tool that will facilitate the analysis of genes expressed during turkey muscle development, as well as the expression of genes underlying the genetic basis of muscle characteristics associated with meat quality.