Comprehensive comparisons of the current human, mouse, and rat RefSeq, Ensembl, EST, and FANTOM3 datasets: identification of new human genes with specific tissue expression profile.
Our understanding of functional genetic elements in the genomes is continuously growing and new entries are entered in various databases on a regular basis. We have here merged the genetic elements in RefSeq, Ensembl, FANTOM3, HINV, and NCBI:s ESTdb using the genome assemblies in order to achieve a comprehensive picture of the current status of the identity and gene number in human, mouse, and rat. The number of human protein coding genes has not increased (25,043) while the increased sequencing of mouse transcripts has provided the considerably higher number of protein coding genes (31,578) in mouse. The results indicate large discrepancies between the datasets, as considerable numbers of unique transcripts can be found in each dataset. Despite the high number of ncRNA (38,129 in mouse) there are also almost 20,000 EST clusters in both mouse and humans with more than one EST that do not overlap any transcript suggesting that several new genetic elements are still to be found. We also demonstrated presence of new genes by identifying new human ones that have specific tissue profiles, using RT-PCR on rat tissues.
Nordström
Karl J V
KJ
Department of Neuroscience, Uppsala University, BMC Box 593, 751 24 Uppsala, Sweden.
Mirza
Majd A I
MA
Larsson
Thomas P
TP
Gloriam
David E I
DE
Fredriksson
Robert
R
Schiöth
Helgi B
HB
D000818:Animals; D019295:Computational Biology / Q000379:methods; D030541:Databases, Genetic; D020224:Expressed Sequence Tags; D020869:Gene Expression Profiling; D016678:Genome; D015894:Genome, Human; D006801:Humans; D051379:Mice; D005810:Multigene Family; D009928:Organ Specificity / Q000235:genetics; D051381:Rats; D020133:Reverse Transcriptase Polymerase Chain Reaction; D012984:Software