BodyMap: A collection of 3 ' ESTs for analysis of human gene expression information

BodyMap is a collection of site-directed 3' expressed sequence tags (ESTs) (gene signatures, GSs) that contains the transcript compositions of various human tissues and was the first systematic effort to acquire gene expressi on data. For the construction of BodyMap, cDNA libraries were made, preserv ing abundance information and histologic resolutions of tissue mRNAs. By se quencing 164,000 randomly selected clones, 88,587 GSs that represent chromo somally coded transcripts have been collected from 51 human organs and tiss ues. They were clustered into 18,722 independent 3' termini From transcript s, and more than 3000 of these were not found among ESTs assembled in UniGe ne (Build 75). Assessment of the prevalence of polyadenylation signals and comparison with GenBank cDNAs indicated that there was no significant conta mination by internally primed cDNAs or genomic fragments but that there was a relatively high incidence (12%) of alternative polyadenylation sites. We evaluated the sensitivity and resolution of expression information in Body Map by in silico Northern hybridization and selection of tissue-specific ge ne probes. BodyMap is a unique resource For estimation of the absolute abun dance of transcripts and selection of gene probes for efficient hybridizati on-based gene expression profiling.