Brain de novo transcriptome assembly of a toad species showing polymorphic anti-predatory behavior

Understanding the genomic underpinnings of antipredatory behaviors is a hot topic in eco-evolutionary research. Yellow-bellied toad of the genus Bombina are textbook examples of the deimatic display, a time-structured behavior aimed at startling predators. Here, we generated the first de novo brain transcriptome of the Apennine yellow-bellied toad Bombina pachypus, a species showing inter-individual variation in the deimatic display. Through Rna-Seq experiments on a set of individuals showing distinct behavioral phenotypes, we generated 316.329.573 reads, which were successfully de novo assembled and annotated. The high quality of the assembly procedure was confirmed by assembly validators and by aligning the contigs against the de novo transcriptome with a percentage of mapping always higher than 91.0%. The homology annotation performed with DIAMOND, calling blastx and blastp function, led to 84718 and 64385 contigs respectively at the same time on Nr, Swissprot and TrEMBL whereas the domain and site protein prediction made with InterProScan led to 6096 GO-annotated contigs. The B. pachypus transcriptome described here will be a valuable resource for further studies on the genomic underpinnings of behavioral variation in amphibians.