The complex transcriptional landscape of the anucleate human platelet

Human blood platelets are essential to maintaining normal hemostasis, and platelet dysfunction often causes bleeding or thrombosis. Estimates of genome-wide platelet RNA expression using microarrays have provided insights to the platelet transcriptome but were limited by the number of known transcripts. The goal of this effort was to deep-sequence RNA from leukocyte-depleted platelets to capture the complex profile of all expressed transcripts.

From each of four healthy individuals we generated long RNA (≥40 nucleotides) profiles from total and ribosomal-RNA depleted RNA preparations, as well as short RNA (