De novo transcriptome profiling of highly purified human lymphocytes primary cells

Raoul J.P. Bonnal, Valeria Ranzani, Alberto Arrigoni, Serena Curti, Ilaria Panzeri, Paola Gruarin, Sergio Abrignani, Grazisa Rossetti, Massimiliano Pagani

To help better understand the role of long noncoding RNAs in the human immune system, we recently generated a comprehensive RNA-seq data set using 63 RNA samples from 13 subsets of T (CD4(+) naive, CD4(+) TH1, CD4(+) TH2, CD4(+) TH17, CD4(+) Treg, CD4(+) TCM, CD4(+) TEM, CD8(+) TCM, CD8(+) TEM, CD8(+) naive) and B (B naive, B memory, B CD5(+)) lymphocytes. There were five biological replicates for each subset except for CD8(+) TCM and B CD5(+) populations that included 4 replicates. RNA-Seq data were generated by an Illumina HiScanSQ sequencer using the TruSeq v3 Cluster kit. 2.192 billion of paired-ends reads, 2×100 bp, were sequenced and after filtering a total of about 1.7 billion reads were mapped. Using different de novo transcriptome reconstruction techniques over 500 previously unknown lincRNAs were identified. The current data set could be exploited to drive the functional characterization of lincRNAs, identify novel genes and regulatory networks associated with specific cells subsets of the human immune system.