Transcriptome comparisons facilitate the identification of developmental, aging, and disease-related genes. To quantify the functionally active genome of adult C57BL/6 mouse heart (AMH), we used serial analysis of gene expression (SAGE) to sequence a total of 88,860 tags or 23,941 unique tags. Over 66% of the unique tags matched either known genes or ESTs. Mitochondrial transcripts accounted for 18.7% of the total transcripts, whereas sarcomeric proteins accounted for 3.2% of all tags. After comparison of AMH expression profiles obtained by SAGE and cDNA arrays, we observed numerous quantitative discrepancies (for example: arrays, mt-Co1 > mt-Co2 > mt-Co3; SAGE, mt-Co1 >> mt-Co3 >or= mt-Co2). We carried out quantitative PCR analyses as an independent test of transcript abundance and determined that SAGE yielded quantitatively reliable data. These SAGE results thus represent the first quantitative expression profile of AMH and serve as a reliable transcriptome reference to identify dynamic changes in cardiac gene expression.