Research Article De Novo Transcriptome Assembly and Differential Gene Expression Profiling of Three Capra hircus Skin Types during Anagen of the Hair Growth Cycle

Copyright © 2013 Teng Xu et al.This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Despite that goat is one of the best nonmodel systems for villus growth studies and hair biology, limited gene resources associated with skin or hair follicles are available. In the present study, using Illumina/Solexa sequencing technology, we de novo assembled 130 million mRNA-Seq reads into a total of 49,115 contigs. Searching public databases revealed that about 45 % of the total contigs can be annotated as known proteins, indicating that some of the assembled contigs may have previously uncharacterized functions. Functional classification by KOG and GO showed that activities associated with metabolism are predominant in goat skin during anagen phase.Many signaling pathwayswas also created based on themapping of assembled contigs to theKEGGpathway database, some of which have been previously demonstrated to have diverse roles in hair follicle and hair shaft formation. Furthermore, gene expression profiling of three skin types identified ∼6,300 transcript-derived contigs that are differentially expressed. These genes mainly enriched in the functional cluster associated with cell cycle and cell division. The large contig catalogue as well as the genes whichwere differentially expressed in different skin types provide valuable candidates for further characterization of gene functions. 1