As a direct result of intense heat and aridity, deserts are thought to be among the most harsh of environments, particularly for their mammalian inhabitants. Given that osmoregulation can be challenging for these animals, with failure resulting in death, strong selection should be observed on genes related to the maintenance of water and solute balance. One such animal, Peromyscus eremicus, is native to the desert regions of the southwest United States and may live its entire life without oral fluid intake. As a first step toward understanding the genetics that underlie this phenotype, we present a characterization of the P. eremicus transcriptome. We assay four tissues (kidney, liver, brain, testes) from a single individual and supplement this with population level renal transcriptome sequencing from 15 additional animals. We identified a set of transcripts undergoing both purifying and balancing selection based on estimates of Tajima’s D. In addition, we used the branch-site test to identify a transcript—Slc2a9, likely related to desert osmoregulation—undergoing enhanced selection in P. eremicus relative to a set of related non-desert rodents.

Brain derived contigsThese are the contigs derived from the RNA collected from brain tissue.brain.final.fastaKidney derived contigsPutative transcripts from renal tissue.kidney.final.fastaLiver derived transcriptsPutative transcripts from liver tissue.liver.final.fastaTestes derived transcriptsPutative transcripts from testes tissue.testes.final.fastaPfam resultsThese are the results from the Pfam search against Pero.BLTK.fastapero.pfam4Tissue.transcriptsThis file contains the putative transcripts from all tissues, and serves as the basis for most of the downstream analyses.Pero.BLTK.fastaTranscript expressionThis file contains the expression data for all transcripts in the Pero.BLTK.fasta file.Pero.tissue.xprsCoding sequencesThis file contains the predicted coding sequencesPero.BLTK.cdsAnalysis codeThis file contains code used in the bioinformatic analyses.analyses.md