Transcriptome profiling of Tasmanian Devil facial tumor (DFTD1) cell lines of 4 strains and the fibroblast cell line.

Purpose: To asses the transcriptome of 4 strains of the Tasmanian Devil facial tumor and one healthy fibroblast cell line. Methods: DFTD cells were grown from primary cell cultures derived from fine needle aspirates that have been collected from the wild. Total RNA from devil facial tumor strains 1-4 and the fibroblast was isolated from approximately 1 x 10^6 cells using QIAzol lysis reagent according to the manufacturer’s instructions (Qiagen). RNA-seq libraries were prepared with TruSeq Stranded mRNA LT sample preparation kit (Illumina) using Sciclone and Zephyr liquid handling robotics (PerkinElmer). The 5 libraries were pooled, diluted and sequenced on Illumina HiSeq 3000/4000 using 75 bp paired-end chemistry. Base calls provided by the Illumina Realtime Analysis software were converted into BAM format using Illumina2bam and demultiplexed using BamIndexDecoder. Paired-end reads were trimmed for adaptor sequences and filtered with the trimmomatic tool. Trimmed reads were aligned on the version 7.0 of the Tasmanian Devil with the STAR aligner. Counting of reads on annotated transcripts (Sarcophilus_harrisii.DEVIL7.0.90.gtf from Ensembl) was performed with featurecounts on fragments. The DESeq2 Biconductor library has been used for counts normalization and differential analysis between the transcriptomes of the four DFTD and fibroblast cell lines High coverage paired-end mRNA sequencing of 4 DFTD strains and one healthy fibroblast (Sarcophilus harrisii) were generated on a Illumina HiSeq 3000/4000 sequencer.