Data from: Sexy fingers: Pheromones in the glands of male dendrobatid frogs

Our study investigates the role of the swollen fingers of two dendrobatid species, Leucostethus brachistriatus, and Epipedobates anthonyi, in pheromone production using whole-transcriptome sequencing (RNAseq). We examined differential gene expression in the swollen versus non-swollen fingers and toes. The overwhelming pattern of gene expression in both species was strong upregulation of sodefrin precursor-like factors (SPFs) in swollen fingers, a well-known pheromone system in salamanders. As part of the results, we include a fasta-file with the RNA-seq assemblies from each species, as well as their annotation and Differential expression (DE) analyses. Likewise, we include the alignment of some of the most highly expressed sodefrin precursor-like-factor (SPF) sequences ; Funding provided by: The Zoo Frankfurt * Crossref Funder Registry ID: Award Number: ; We collected adult males from Leucostethus brachistriatus and Epipedobates anthonyi . Three males were used for the RNA sequencing analysis. We sampled both fingers IV (as a target tissue) of three males from each species and as a control tissue, we sampled both fingers III of L. brachistriatus and both toes III of E. anthonyi . We realized the RNA extraction, and library preparation and sequencing were done by Genewiz in Leipzig, Germany. A total of 12 samples were sequenced for this study in a paired-sample design (i.e., paired control–swollen samples for each of three males per species). Assembly Our general approach was to (1) assemble on a per-individual basis using both tissue samples at once (swollen and control), (2) perform each assembly at multiple kmer sizes, and (3) merge the multiple assemblies into a single non-redundant assembly for each species. Multi-kmer assembly and subsequent merging with the tr2aacds pipeline (Gilbert, 2013) has been found to yield assemblies with greater completeness and lower sequence duplication with respect to BUSCO benchmarks (Mamrot et al., 2017). Transcriptome assembly was done with SPAdes v.3.13.1 (Bankevich et al., ...