Data from: "Polar bear (Ursus maritimus) transcriptome assembly and SNP discovery" in Genomic Resources Notes accepted 1 August 2013-30 September 2013

Polar bears (Ursus maritimus) in the Western Hudson Bay subpopulation have
been declining in size and body condition for decades, as climate change
causes earlier sea ice breakup, reduced hunting time on the ice, and an
increasingly long fasting season. As Western Hudson Bay females have
decreased in size, rates of litter production and average litter size have
also decreased, while cub mortality and average time to independence have
increased. Although these changes have potential evolutionary
consequences, little is yet known about the adaptive genetic variation in
body size or fat accumulation that would have to underlie any such change.
In this study, we used high-throughput Illumina sequencing to develop SNPs
from pooled blood and fat transcriptomes, using samples from five adult
female polar bears and five (unrelated) dependent cubs. In total, we
generated 371,258 transcripts of which 36,755 were deemed to be “full
length” (i.e., covered more than 90% of their best BLAST hit), and we
identified 63,020 SNPs. Since this study was conducted, we have used a
subset of these SNPs to develop an Illumina BeadArray for quantitative
genetics research in Western Hudson Bay.