Transcriptomes of thirteen healthy feline tissue types

The domestic cat, Felis catus, is a popular worldwide pet but is prone to many genetic diseases in both purebred and random-bred cats. Many of these genetic diseases can serve as important feline models of cognate human diseases. To help understand the fundamental basis of some of these diseases and because healthy tissue sequence is difficult to obtain, we provide a resource of transcriptome sequences from thirteen healthy feline tissue types (adipose, brain cortex, hip joint capsule, cardiac, renal cortex, renal medulla, ileum, jejunum, liver, pancreas, round ligament of the femoral head, skin, and thyroid gland). These represent the tissue types affected with common complex diseases of cats diagnosed at the Cornell University Companion Animal Hospital.

Postmortem tissue specimens were sampled from six healthy cats, for a total of 78 samples. Both mRNA-enriched libraries by poly(A) selection and rRNA-depleted libraries were created for sequencing. These produced transcriptome datasets of high quality, as shown by clustering of samples from the same tissue type in a Principal Components Analysis, by comparison of enriched genes to human tissue in the Genotype-Tissue Expression portal, and by high levels of expected tissue-specific gene expression with relevant pathway enrichment.

We make this dataset publicly available to expand the genomic resources available for future domestic cat research, such as functional studies to confirm variants for complex diseases discovered by genome-wide association studies, and for improving the annotation of the feline genome. Future research could leverage this dataset to explore gene expression profiles of disease-associated genomic variants and their interactions with environmental factors that influence both feline and human health.