Data on the de novo transcriptome assembly for the migratory bird, the Common quail (Coturnix coturnix)

Valeria Marasco; Leonida Fusani; Gianni Pola; Steve Smith

doi:10.1016/j.dib.2020.106041

Data on the de novo transcriptome assembly for the migratory bird, the Common quail (Coturnix coturnix)

Data Brief. 2020 Jul 20:32:106041. doi: 10.1016/j.dib.2020.106041. eCollection 2020 Oct.

Authors

Valeria Marasco¹, Leonida Fusani^{1

2}, Gianni Pola³, Steve Smith¹

Affiliations

¹ Konrad Lorenz Institute of Ethology, Department of Interdisciplinary Life Sciences, University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna, Savoyenstrasse 1a, Vienna 1160, Austria.
² Department of Behavioural and Cognitive Biology, University of Vienna, Althanstrasse 14, Vienna 1090, Austria.
³ Istituto Sperimentale Zootecnico per la Sicilia, via roccazzo 85, Palermo 90135, Italy.

Abstract

The Common or European quail (Coturnix coturnix) is a Galliform bird of ecological importance for research in the field of animal migration. The Common quail is also a game bird, thus, of great interest for recreational activities and conservation management. Here, we generated a high quality de novo transcriptome for the Common quail for which no reference genome is to date publicly available. The transcriptome was obtained from a population of Common quail originated from captive founders raised under laboratory conditions. Paired-end RNA-Sequencing reads were obtained from extracted total RNA of brain tissue punches (preoptic-hypothalamic region) of 23 quails, which yielded to 5.5-11.2 million reads per individual bird for a total of 236 million reads. After assembly optimization, we used a stringent filtering analysis pipeline to remove redundant and low confidence transcripts. The final transcriptome consisted of 22,293 transcripts of which 21,551 (97%) were provided with annotation data. Our data offers a high quality pipeline for compiling transcriptomes of complex non-genomic species. Our data also provide a robust reference for gene expression studies in this species or other related Galliform species, including the Japanese quail.

Keywords: Avian migration; Common quail; De novo assembly; Gene Ontology (GO) analysis; RNA-Sequencing; annotation; transcriptome.