The Rhinella arenarum transcriptome: de novo assembly, annotation and gene prediction.

CESCHIN, DANILO GUILLERMO; PIRES, NATALIA SUSANA; MARDIROSIAN, MARIANA NOELIA; LASCANO, CECILIA INÉS; VENTURINO, ANDRÉS

Scientific Reports

Springer Nature

Año: 2020

The common toad Rhinella arenarum is amply distributed in Argentina and is widely used as an autochthonous model in ecotoxicological research and environmental toxicology. However, the lack of a reference genome difficult molecular assays and gene expression studies on this non-model species. To address this issue, we used RNA sequencing to perform a genome-wide transcriptome analysis of R. arenarum larvae, followed by de novo assembly, annotation, and gene prediction. We obtained 57,407 well-annotated transcripts representing 99.4 % of transcriptome completeness (available at http://rhinella.uncoma.edu.ar). We also defined a set of 52,800 high-confidence lncRNA transcripts and demonstrated the reliability of the transcriptome data to perform phylogenetic analysis. Our comprehensive transcriptome analysis of R. arenarum represents a valuable resource for both functional genomics studies and identification of potential molecular biomarkers in ecotoxicological research.