Abstract
The immune system of the horse has not been well studied, despite the fact that the horse displays several features such as sensitivity to bacterial lipopolysaccharide that make them in many ways a more suitable model of some human disorders than the current rodent models. The difficulty of working with large animal models has however limited characterisation of gene expression in the horse immune system with current annotations for the equine genome restricted to predictions from other mammals and the few described horse proteins. This paper outlines sequencing of 184 million transcriptome short reads from immunologically active tissues of three horses including the genome reference “Twilight”. In a comparison with the Ensembl horse genome annotation, we found 8,763 potentially novel isoforms.
Highlights
While no longer the principal means of transport in much of the world, the horse is still an economically important animal in agriculture, sport and gambling associated with horse racing
The analysis conducted here provides insight into the transcriptome of immune tissues from the horse and makes these analyses freely available (Supplemental Files). Whilst it is unclear why the horse transcriptome should contain the specific expansions of gene families described, the analysis provided insight into potential areas of T-cell biology which may underlie equine specific immunobiology
The analysis conducted allowed the identification of gene expansions such as UGT1A6, part of a putative paralogous gene expansion in horse relative to human
Summary
While no longer the principal means of transport in much of the world, the horse is still an economically important animal in agriculture, sport and gambling associated with horse racing. There are several components of the equine immune system that make them in many ways a better model of some human disorders than the most commonly used rodent models. These include, to humans, an exquisite sensitivity to the effects of lipopolysaccharide (LPS) with associated endotoxemia and sepsis (Bryant et al, 2007). The immune response of the horse has not been well characterised, largely due to the difficulties in working with large animals in experimental settings. With the difficulty in working with large animals, there is a lack of expressed sequence tag (EST) data, the current annotation of the protein coding regions of the horse
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