Jinrong Huang:
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The mammalian central nervous system, including brain and spinal cord, is immensely complex. An increasing number of transcriptomic studies on human and mouse brain have generated information to understand the structural complexity and development of the mammalian brain. Owing to the similarities to human and the advantages over non-human primates and rodents, pig is considered as an alternative large animal model in neuroscience. However, the knowledge of mRNA expression and RNA editing in the pig brain remains limited. In this study, a total of 119 samples, representing 30 subregions within the pig brain, were collected from four adult pigs, including two male and two female. The bulk RNA sequencing strategy was applied in the transcriptomics investigations, including analysis of mRNA expression and RNA editing. A total of 18,686 genes were found to be expressed based on the RNA sequences and 971 protein-coding genes with regionally elevated expression were identified in the pig brain. The cross-species comparisons reveal that global mRNA expression patterns are generally conserved among pig, mouse and human brain. However, the expression patterns in the human cerebellum and hypothalamus are more similar to that in pig than that in mouse. Additionally, we identified a total of 682,037 A-to-I RNA editing sites, most of which were firstly discovered within the pig brain. The expression of ADAR1 and ADAR2 accounted for 22-27% of the regional variation of A-to-I RNA editing. In conclusion, we provide a resource to broaden our understanding of mRNA expression and RNA editing in the mammalian brain.