A global transcriptome analysis of a dog model of congestive heart failure with the human genome as a reference

The global molecular changes in cardiac tissue during congestive heart failure (CHF) have not been fully examined. Transcriptome analysis with the use of next-generation sequencers is a useful tool for elucidating the pathogenesis of CHF. Although there are some advantages in a dog CHF model, transcriptome analyses in dogs are limited by the relative lack of genomic information.

The transcriptome analysis of hearts from dogs with CHF was conducted with the use of a genome analyzer and the Casava software. The mRNA sequence reads showed alignments with ∼800 of 1,019 genes from the dog reference database. On the other hand, the reads aligned with ∼15,000 of the 21,407 genes in the hg19 human reference database. The correlation of expressed genes was extremely high (r = 0.93; P < .0001) between the dog and human databases. A pathway analysis using the hg19 reference revealed increased expression of p53 pathway-related (P < 10(-10)) and inflammatory interleukin-related (P < 10(-10)) genes in the CHF model.

The use of the human genome as a reference in global transcriptome analyses of dogs is a useful approach for investigating diseases such as CHF. Such an approach would also be useful for analyzing disease models in other experimental animals.