Analysis of expressed sequence tags from a fetal human heart cDNA library

Single-pass sequencing of randomly selected cDNA clones to generate expressed sequence tags (ESTs) has been widely used to identify novel genes and to study gene expression in a variety of tissues. We have generated 2244 ESTs from a human fetal heart library (GenBank Accession Nos. R30692-30774 and R56965-58824), which we present in this report. Of these, 51.7% showed no homology to known genes or were similar only to other ESTs, while 48.4% demonstrated homology to known transcripts. A total of 764 ESTs corresponding to known genes were used to study gene expression patterns in the fetal heart and to analyze differences in these patterns from those observed in the adult heart. These analyses demonstrate the utility of ESTs and sequence-tagged clones in comparative studies of gene expression in the cardiovascular system, and they reveal that differential gene expression underlies the structural and functional characteristics of the developing heart.