Analysis of expressed sequence tags of porcine skeletal muscle

Porcine skeletal muscle genes play a major role in determining muscle growt h and meat quality. Therefore, to progress towards a better understanding o f the genetic factors influencing these traits, the first step is to charac terize the genes expressed in skeletal muscle tissue in pig. To this aim, w e constructed a porcine biceps femoris muscle cDNA library and sequenced 11 1 randomly isolated clones. By FASTA. analysis we identified 72 unique clon es: 47 showed homology to previously identified genes in human or other mam mals, 20 matched uncharacterized expressed sequence tags (ESTs), two showed no significant matches to sequences already present in DNA databases, and three other clones containing only repetitive elements were excluded from f urther analysis. Mitochondrial genes (16.2%), myosin heavy chain genes (9%) and the actin cl skeletal muscle gene (9%) were the most abundant transcri pts. Among the 47 identified genes several muscle-specific or predominant s equences expressed in skeletal muscle were found. The sequences of the clon es matching uncharacterized human, mouse or porcine ESTs were tested by GRA IL in order to identify putative coding regions. The results of our analysi s allowed the establishment of a first list of genes expressed in porcine s keletal muscle. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.