Rat BodyMap transcriptomes reveal unique circular RNA features across tissue types and developmental stages
- Tong Zhou1,
- Xueying Xie2,
- Musheng Li2,
- Junchao Shi3,
- Jin Zhou4,
- Kenneth Knox5,
- Ting Wang5,
- Qi Chen3 and
- Wanjun Gu2,6
- 1 University of Nevada, Reno School of Medicine;
- 2 Southeast University;
- 3 The University of Nevada, Reno School of Medicine;
- 4 The University of Arizona, Tucson;
- 5 The University of Arizona, Phoenix
- ↵* Corresponding author; email: wanjungu{at}gmail.com
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 4 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.
Keywords
- Received May 1, 2018.
- Accepted August 3, 2018.
- Published by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press for the RNA Society
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/.
