A comprehensive nonredundant expressed sequence tag collection for the developing Rattus norvegicus heart

Congenital heart defects affect similar to 1,000,000 people in the United States, with 40,000 new births contributing to that number every year. A large percentage of these defects can be attributed to septal defects. We assembled a nonredundant collection of over 12,000 expressed sequence tags ( ESTs) from a total of 30,000 ESTs, with the ultimate goal of identifying spatially and/ or temporally regulated genes during heart septation. These ESTs were compiled from nonnormalized, normalized, and serially subtracted cDNA libraries derived from two sets of tissue samples. The first includes microdissected rat hearts from embryonic ( E) days E13, E15, and E16.5 - E18.5 and adult heart. The second includes hearts from embryonic days E17, E19, and E21 and postnatal ( P) days P1, P12, P74, and P200. Over 6,000 novel ESTs were identified in the libraries derived from these two sets of tissues, all of which have been contributed to the NCBI rat UniGene collection. It is anticipated that such EST and cDNA clone resources will prove invaluable to gene expression studies aimed at the understanding of the molecular mechanisms underlying heart septation defects.