Transcriptomes of subterranean mammals reveal that naked mole rats have distinctive cardiometabolic and genetic adaptations to their underground low-oxygen lifestyles
We performed RNAseq, metabolomics and pathway enrichment analysis on cardiac tissue from naked mole-rats (Heterocephalus glaber) and from seven other members of African mole rat genera, Cape mole-rat (Georychus capensis), Cape dune mole-rat (Bathyergus suillus), Common mole-rat (Cryptomys hottentotus hottentotus), Natal mole-rat (C. h. natalenesis), Mahali mole rat (C. h. mahali), Highveld mole-rat (C. h. pretoriae) and Damaraland mole-rats (Fukomys damarensis) representing differing burrow and soil types, degrees of sociality, lifespan and hypoxia tolerance. In addition, we include the  evolutionarily highly divergent hottentot golden mole (Ambysomus hottentotus), an Afrotherian subterranean, solitary mammal, and the C57/BL6 laboratory mouse as a standard mammal control. After RNA sequencing, we removed the reads mapped to rRNAs and get rawdata, then we filtered the low quality reads (More than 20% of the bases qualities are lower than 10), reads with adaptors and reads with unknown bases (N bases more than 5%) to get the clean reads. These are the data uploaded.