ANALYSIS OF EXPRESSED SEQUENCE TAGS FROM A FETAL HUMAN HEART CDNA LIBRARY

Single-pass sequencing of randomly selected cDNA clones to generate ex pressed sequence tags (ESTs) has been widely used to identify novel ge nes and to study gene expression in a variety of tissues. We have gene rated 2244 ESTs from a human fetal heart library (GenBank Accession No s. R30692-30774 and R56965-58824), which we present in this report. Of these, 51.7% showed no homology to known genes or were similar only t o other ESTs, while 48.4% demonstrated homology to known transcripts. A total of 764 ESTs corresponding to known genes were used to study ge ne expression patterns in the fetal heart and to analyze differences i n these patterns from those observed in the adult heart. These analyse s demonstrate the utility of ESTs and sequence-tagged clones in compar ative studies of gene expression in the cardiovascular system, and the y reveal that differential gene expression underlies the structural an d functional characteristics of the developing heart. (C) 1995 Academi c Press, Inc.