Northern elephant seal inner and outer blubber transcriptome assembly

Blubber samples were collected from 3 female juvenile northern elephant seals (Mirounga angustirostris) in January 2020. Samples were divided into 3 similarly-sized pieces; RNA was extracted from the outermost and innermost blubber portions using Qiagen RNeasy Lipid Mini Kit (RIN: 7.7-8.8). Strand-specific 150-bp paired-end cDNA library preparation and NovaSeq S4 sequencing were conducted by QB3 Genomics, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA (RRID:SCR_022170). Raw data were uploaded to NCBI Sequence Read Archive (BioProject ID: PRJNA874098). Transcriptome assembly, annotation, and transcript abundance estimation were conducted using the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) Bridges2 Large High Performance Computing Cluster at the Pittsburg Supercomputing Center (allocation TG-IBN150010; Towns et al., 2014). The transcriptome was assembled de novo using the default Trinity v2.11.0 pipeline with no modifications (Haas et al., 2013). Assembled transcripts were annotated by blastx against the UniProt Caniformia database (Taxonomy ID: 379584, 549,465 sequences, downloaded 8/10/2021) using Diamond v0.8.31 run in ultra-sensitive mode (k = 1, e-value = 1e-3; Buchfink et al., 2015).