De novo transcriptome assembly databases for the central nervous system of the medicinal leech

Abstract

The study of non-model organisms stands to benefit greatly from genetic and genomic data. For a better understanding of the molecular mechanisms driving neuronal development, and to characterize the entire leech Hirudo medicinalis central nervous system (CNS) transcriptome we combined Trinity for de-novo assembly and Illumina HiSeq2000 for RNA-Seq. We present a set of 73,493 de-novo assembled transcripts for the leech, reconstructed from RNA collected, at a single ganglion resolution, from the CNS. This set of transcripts greatly enriches the available data for the leech. Here, we share two databases, such that each dataset allows a different type of search for candidate homologues. The first is the raw set of assembled transcripts. This set allows a sequence-based search. A comprehensive analysis of which revealed 22,604 contigs with high e-values, aligned versus the Swiss-Prot database. This analysis enabled the production of the second database, which includes correlated sequences to annotated transcript names, with the confidence of BLAST best hit.