A maturation, sex and lunar phase locked Platynereis transcriptome.. Platynereis head transcriptome

Platynereis dumerilii heads were sampled from males and females at defined stages of sexual maturation (immature, premature and mature) different moon phases; namely, New moon, Full moon and Free-running Full moon, i.e. when the nocturnal light stimulus (Full moon) was expected but not given. Form these heads (six per sample), RNA was extracted, mRNA was then enriched by oligo-dT-beads, chemically fragmented and cDNA synthesised. The libraries were sequenced on an Illumina platform and the obtained reads used for de novo transcriptome assembly. The assembly was curated by removing known contaminants from bacteria and viruses, as well as from common model organisms such as C.elegans and D. melanogaster.In a second round, animal heads were sampled as before but omitting the samples under Full moon conditions and including biological replicates of each sample, in total three biological replicates consisting of six heads each. These samples were processed as before and mapped against the previously generated transcriptome. The read counts per transcript were then used for differential expression analysis.