Rat BodyMap transcriptomes reveal unique circular RNA features across tissue types and developmental stages
- Tong Zhou1,5,
- Xueying Xie2,5,
- Musheng Li2,5,
- Junchao Shi1,
- Jin J. Zhou3,
- Kenneth S. Knox4,
- Ting Wang4,
- Qi Chen1 and
- Wanjun Gu2
- 1Department of Physiology and Cell Biology, The University of Nevada, Reno School of Medicine, Reno, Nevada 89557, USA
- 2State Key Laboratory of Bioelectronics, School of Biological Sciences and Medical Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing, Jiangsu 210096, China
- 3Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, The University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona 85721, USA
- 4Department of Internal Medicine, College of Medicine Phoenix, The University of Arizona, Phoenix, Arizona 85004, USA
- Corresponding authors: wanjungu{at}seu.edu.cn, tongz{at}med.unr.edu
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↵5 These authors contributed equally to this work.
Abstract
Circular RNAs (circRNAs) are a novel class of regulatory RNAs. Here, we present a comprehensive investigation of circRNA expression profiles across 11 tissues and four developmental stages in rats, along with cross-species analyses in humans and mice. Although the expression of circRNAs is positively correlated with that of cognate mRNAs, highly expressed genes tend to splice a larger fraction of circular transcripts. Moreover, circRNAs exhibit higher tissue specificity than cognate mRNAs. Intriguingly, while we observed a monotonic increase of circRNA abundance with age in the rat brain, we further discovered a dynamic, age-dependent pattern of circRNA expression in the testes that is characterized by a dramatic increase with advancing stages of sexual maturity and a decrease with aging. The age-sensitive testicular circRNAs are highly associated with spermatogenesis, independent of cognate mRNA expression. The tissue/age implications of circRNAs suggest that they present unique physiological functions rather than simply occurring as occasional by-products of gene transcription.
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Footnotes
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Article is online at http://www.rnajournal.org/cgi/doi/10.1261/rna.067132.118.
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Freely available online through the RNA Open Access option.
- Received May 1, 2018.
- Accepted August 3, 2018.
This article, published in RNA, is available under a Creative Commons License (Attribution 4.0 International), as described at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
