A web resource on skeletal muscle transcriptome of primates

Abstract

Skeletal muscle represents a very well organized anatomical tissue in animals and its appearance might have predated the divergence of vertebrate and arthropods lineages about 700MYA. This diversified structure is very well visible in Primates since it differentiates according to their life styles and environmental conditions. This study focuses on Pan troglodytes - known as common chimpanzee - which belongs to a genus that is the most closely related to human species by which also shares a high similarity in the DNA composition. Our aim is to test the level of similarity between chimpanzee and human DNA - diversified to a functional phenotypic level to better adapt in different environmental conditions - by collecting skeletal muscle transcriptomic data from ENA (European Nucleotide Archive) database and performing its functional annotation analysis. We developed PrimatesDB, a freely available web-oriented application which contains 30,944 sequences belonging to Pan troglodytes skeletal muscle transcriptomic data and from which it is possible to retrieve all the information related to 12,222 transcripts.