PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Céline Le Béguec
AU  - Valentin Wucher
AU  - Lætitia Lagoutte
AU  - Edouard Cadieu
AU  - Nadine Botherel
AU  - Benoît Hédan
AU  - Clotilde De Brito
AU  - Guillory Anne-Sophie
AU  - Catherine André
AU  - Thomas Derrien
AU  - Christophe Hitte
TI  - Characterisation and functional predictions of canine long non-coding RNAs
AID  - 10.1101/303966
DP  - 2018 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 303966
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/04/20/303966.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/04/20/303966.full
AB  - Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) are a family of heterogeneous RNAs that play major roles in multiple biological processes. We recently identified an extended repertoire of more than 10,000 lncRNAs of the domestic dog however, predicting their biological functionality remains challenging. In this study, we have characterised the expression profiles of 10,444 canine lncRNAs in 26 distinct tissue types, representing various anatomical systems. We showed that lncRNA expressions are mainly clustered by tissue type and we highlighted that 44% of canine lncRNAs are expressed in a tissue-specific manner. We further demonstrated that tissue-specificity correlates with specific families of canine transposable elements. In addition, we identified more than 900 conserved dog-human lncRNAs for which we show their overall reproducible expression patterns between dog and humans through comparative transcriptomics. Finally, co-expression analyses of lncRNA and neighbouring protein-coding genes identified more than 3,400 canine lncRNAs, suggesting that functional roles of these lncRNAs act as regulatory elements. Altogether, this genomic and transcriptomic integrative study of lncRNAs constitutes a major resource to investigate genotype to phenotype relationships and biomedical research in the dog species.