De novo transcriptome assembly reveals sex-specific selection acting on evolving neo-sex chromosomes in Drosophila miranda.

ABSTRACT:

Background

The Drosophila miranda neo-sex chromosome system is a useful resource for studying recently evolved sex chromosomes. However, the neo-Y genomic assembly is fragmented due to the accumulation of repetitive sequence. Furthermore, the separate assembly of the neo-X and neo-Y chromosomes into genomic scaffolds has proven to be difficult, due to their low level of sequence divergence, which in coding regions is about 1.5%. Here, we de novo assemble the transcriptome of D. miranda using RNA-seq data from several male and female tissues, and develop a bioinformatic pipeline to separately reconstruct neo-X and neo-Y transcripts.

Results

We obtain 2,141 transcripts from the neo-X and 1,863 from the neo-Y. Neo-Y transcripts are generally shorter than their homologous neo-X

SUBMITTER: Kaiser VB 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3986819 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature