Onthophagus taurus tissue-specific bulk RNA-seq

Onthophagus taurus is an emerging model system for the study of intraspecific developmental differences. This study focused on the development of five adult traits that vary in the degree of morphological sex differences they exhibit: external genitalia, posterior head, anterior head, fore tibia, and elytra. The epithelially-derived tissue primordia corresponding to each trait were dissected from pupae within 12 hours of pupation and prepared for RNA-sequencing. Six male and six female biological replicates were collected from each tissue type. RNA-sequencing was performed on an Illumina NextSeq 2000 with a 50-cycle P3 flow cell over four sequencing runs, generating up to four technical replicates per biological sample.