RNA-sequencing of pig oocyte throughout meiotic maturation
Oocyte maturation refers to oocytes at the germinal vesicle stage progressing into metaphase II (MII) stage of development. Even though numerous studies have shown key genes and potential important signalling cascades, which drive the GV to MII transition, a system-wide analysis of underlying differences at gene level and especially at transcript level between the two developmental stages of the oocyte is still lacking. For this, we profiled and analysed RNA from pig oocytes across meiotic maturation (GV, MII and damaged, n=15). We detected 22,516 genes for each sample across meiotic maturation. Principal Component analysis of the data clustered the samples in three stages of development (GV, MII and damaged). Differential expression of genes between the three stages will then be used to delineate the pathways which are up-/down-regulated during these developmental stages. Besides, differential transcript usage will be used to identify the difference of oocytes at distinct developmental stages at isoform level, which might be ignored by traditional differential gene expression analysis. Overall design: Pig oocyte mRNA profiles from three developmental stages, GV  (germinal vesicle, n=5), MII (metaphase II, n=5) and 'damaged' (oocytes without visible polar body after in vitro maturation/IVM, n = 5)