We introduce a new high-throughput transcriptomics (HTTr) platform comprised of a collagen sandwich primary rat hepatocyte culture and the TempO-Seq assay for screening and prioritizing potential hepatotoxicants. We selected 14 chemicals based on their risk of drug-induced liver injury (DILI) and tested them in hepatocytes at two treatment concentrations. HTTr data was generated using the TempO-Seq whole transcriptome and S1500+ assays. The HTTr platform exhibited high reproducibility between technical replicates (r>0.9) but biological replication was greater for TempO-Seq S1500+ (r>0.85) than for the whole transcriptome (r>0.7). Reproducibility between biological replicates was dependent on the strength of transcriptional effects induced by a chemical treatment. Despite targeting a smaller number of genes, the S1500+ assay clustered chemical treatments and produced gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA) scores comparable to those of the whole transcriptome. Connectivity mapping showed a high-level of reproducibility between TempO-Seq data and Affymetrix GeneChip data from the Open TG-GATES project with high concordance between the S1500+ gene set and whole transcriptome. Taken together, our results provide guidance on selecting the number of technical and biological replicates and support the use of TempO-Seq S1500+ assay for a high-throughput platform for screening hepatotoxicants. FASTQ files and read counts data have been deposited in the National Center for Biotechnology Information Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) (GSE152128).

This dataset is associated with the following publication: Lee, F., I. Shah, Y.T. Soong, J. Xing, I.C. Ng, F. Tasnim, and H. Yu. Reproducibility and Robustness of High-Throughput S1500+ Transcriptomics on Primary Rat Hepatocytes for Chemical-Induced Hepatotoxicity Assessment. Current Research in Toxicology. Elsevier B.V., Amsterdam, NETHERLANDS, 2: 282-295, (2021).