Data from: Gene discovery in the Antarctic fur seal (Arctocephalus gazella) skin transcriptome

Next-generation sequencing provides a powerful new approach for developing
functional genomic tools for nonmodel species, helping to narrow the gap
between studies of model organisms and those of natural populations.
Consequently, massively parallel 454 sequencing was used to characterize a
normalized cDNA library derived from skin biopsy samples of twelve
Antarctic fur seal (Arctocephalus gazella) individuals. Over 412 Mb of
sequence data were generated, comprising 1.4 million reads of average
length 286 bp. De novo assembly using Newbler 2.3 yielded 156 contigs plus
22 869 isotigs, which in turn clustered into 18 576 isogroups. Almost half
of the assembled transcript sequences showed significant similarity to the
nr database, revealing a functionally diverse array of genes. Moreover,
97.9% of these mapped to the dog (Canis lupis familiaris) genome, with a
strong positive relationship between the number of sequences locating to a
given chromosome and the length of that chromosome in the dog indicating a
broad genomic distribution. Average depth of coverage was also almost
20-fold, sufficient to detect several thousand putative microsatellite
loci and single nucleotide polymorphisms. This study constitutes an
important step towards developing genomic resources with which to address
consequential questions in pinniped ecology and evolution. It also
supports an earlier but smaller study showing that skin tissue can be a
rich source of expressed genes, with important implications for studying
the genomics not only of marine mammals, but also more generally of
species that cannot be destructively sampled.