Gene expression profiles of specific chicken skeletal muscles

Abstract

The chicken provides large amounts of protein for the human diet and is also used as a model organism for biomedical research. Increasing meat production is an important goal in the poultry industry and skeletal muscles have highly diverse origins, shapes, metabolic features, and physical functions. Previous gene expression atlases have largely ignored the differences among diverse types of skeletal muscles; therefore, comprehensive transcriptional maps of all skeletal muscles are needed to improve meat production traits. In this study, we sequenced 58 samples from 10 different skeletal muscles of 42-day-old White Plymouth Rock chickens. We also measured myofiber diameter and generated myofiber-type datasets of these 10 tissues. We generated 418.4 Gb high-quality bulk RNA-Seq data from four or six biological replicates of each skeletal muscle (four replicates from extraocular samples) (approximately 7.4 Gb per sample). This dataset provides valuable information for understanding the muscle fiber characteristics of White Plymouth Rock chickens. Furthermore, our data can be used as a model for heterogeneity analysis between tissues with similar properties.