Transcriptome analysis of a North American songbird, Melospiza melodia

We sampled two growing individuals from each of three populations of song sparrow from Alaska. Whole-body mRNA was normalized and sequenced via 454 technology, yielding more than 100,000 reads per population (110 Mb total). Cleaned sequences were assembled into 38,539 contigs (with N50 = 482 bp), 4,574 of which were orthologous to both the zebra finch and chicken genomes and 3,680 of which are functionally annotated. We detected 29,982 SNPs/indels, 1,402 of which were fixed between populations and subspecies.