Transcriptomic dataset from peripheral white blood cells of beef heifers at weaning

Reproductive failure of replacement breeding animals is one of the leading causes of loss to the beef production industry. The losses are further increased due to the inability to di-agnose the reproductive potential of the beef heifer prior to the breeding season until the pregnancy outcome. To over-come this problem, a system to discriminate beef heifers with varying reproductive potential as early and accurately as possible is demanded. The omics technologies, such as tran-scriptomics, could predict the future reproductive potential of beef heifers. Therefore, this manuscript provides the gene expression profile dataset using RNA-Seq identified from pe-ripheral white blood cells (PWBC) of beef heifers at weaning. To accomplish this, the blood samples were collected at the time of weaning, processed to extract the PWBC pellet and stored at - 80 degrees C until further processing. After the breeding protocol (artificial insemination (AI) followed by natural bull service) and pregnancy diagnosis, the heifers that were preg-nant to AI ( n = 8) or remained open (n = 7) were utilized for this study. Total RNA was extracted from PWBC collected at the time of weaning from these samples and subjected to sequencing using the Illumina Nova-Seq platform. High -quality sequencing data was analyzed using a bioinformatic workflow based on FastQC and MultiQC for quality control, STAR for read alignment, and DESeq2 for differential expres-sion analysis. Genes were considered significantly differen-tially expressed after adjustment with Bonferroni correction (padj <= 0.05) and absolute (log2 fold change) >= 0.5. Raw and processed RNA-Seq data were deposited and made publicly available on the gene expression omnibus database (GEO; GSE221903). To our knowledge, this is the first dataset inves-tigating the change in the gene expression level as early as weaning to predict the future reproductive outcome in beef heifers. Interpretation of the main findings based on this data is reported in a research article titled "mRNA Signatures in Peripheral White Blood Cells Predicts Reproductive Potential in Beef Heifers at Weaning" [1].Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY license ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ )