Brain transcriptome sequencing and assembly of three songbird model systems for the study of social behavior
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Animal Behavior, Evolutionary Studies, Genomics, Neuroscience
- Keywords
- song learning, Illumina, RNA-seq, Zonotrichia, song sparrow, white-throated sparrow, white-crowned sparrow, zebra finch
- Copyright
- © 2014 Balakrishnan et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2014. Brain transcriptome sequencing and assembly of three songbird model systems for the study of social behavior. PeerJ PrePrints 2:e297v3 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.297v3
Abstract
Emberizid sparrows (emberizidae) have played a prominent role in the study of avian vocal communication and social behavior. We present here brain transcriptomes for three emberizid model systems, song sparrow Melospiza melodia, white-throated sparrow Zonotrichia albicollis, and Gambel’s white-crowned sparrow Zonotrichia leucophrys gambelii. Each of the assemblies covered fully or in part, over 89% of the previously annotated protein coding genes in the zebra finch Taeniopygia guttata, with 16,846, 15,805, and 16,646 unique BLAST hits in song, white-throated and white-crowned sparrows, respectively. As in previous studies, we find tissue of origin (auditory forebrain versus hypothalamus and whole brain) as a primary determinant of overall expression profile. We also demonstrate the successful isolation of RNA and RNA-sequencing from post-mortem samples from building strikes and suggest that such an approach could be useful when traditional sampling opportunities are limited. These transcriptomes will be an important resource for the study of social behavior in birds and for data driven annotation of forthcoming whole genome sequences for these and other bird species.
Author Comment
This manuscript will be submitted to PeerJ for peer review. The third version of this preprint has been edited to accommodate feedback on the original MS.