design: The rat was injected intraperitoneally three times with saline at 90 min, as well as 2.5 and 6.5 hours after tMCAO. At 24 h after tMCAO, rat was decapitated, the damaged striatum was dissected and total RNA was isolated. The RNAse R-treated fraction from total RNA (circular RNA-fraction) was used for RNA-seq. Sequencing was carried out using an Illumina HiSeq 2500 instrument. At least 20 million reads (1/200 nt) were generated.