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. 2015 May 7;16(1):358.
doi: 10.1186/s12864-015-1520-6.

Molecular tools to support metabolic and immune function research in the Guinea Fowl (Numida meleagris)

Carl E Darris  1 , James E Tyus  2 , Gary Kelley  3 , Alexander J Ropelewski  4 , Hugh B Nicholas Jr  5 , Xiaofei Wang  6 , Samuel Nahashon  7
Affiliations

Molecular tools to support metabolic and immune function research in the Guinea Fowl (Numida meleagris)

Carl E Darris et al. BMC Genomics. .

Abstract

Background: Guinea fowl (Numidia meleagris) production as an alternative source of meat and poultry has shown potential for economic viability. However, there has been little progress in characterizing the transcriptome of the guinea fowl. In this study RNA-sequencing and de novo transcriptome assembly of several Guinea fowl tissues (pancreas, hypothalamus, liver, bone marrow and bursa) which play key roles in regulating feed intake, satiety, and immune function was performed using Illumina's Hi-Seq 2000.

Results: 74 million sequences were generated and assembled into 96,492 contigs using the Trinity software suite. Over 39,000 of these transcripts were found to have in silico translated protein sequences that are homologous to chicken protein sequences. Gene ontology analysis uncovered 416 transcripts with metabolic functions and 703 with immune function.

Conclusion: The transcriptome information presented here will support the development of molecular approaches to improve production efficiency of the guinea fowl and other avian species.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Analysis of Contig Assembly. Contig assembly resulted in 96,491 contigs with a minimum length of 200 bases, a mean length of 865 bases and a N50 value of 14,660.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Distribution of GO Annotation. In total 433331 annotations across all categories (P: biological processes, C: cellular components, F: molecular function) were assigned to the GF contigs with the mean GO level of 6.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Distribution of Level 2 GO Terms. These bar charts illustrate the distribution of GO terms categorized as biological process, cellular components or molecular function assigned to GF contigs. Distribution within the molecular function category indicates some role in binding for over 80% of the contigs.
Figure 4
Figure 4
GF contigs Annotation results from Fast Annotator. Depicted in this venn diagram are the annotation results from Fast Annotator software which assigned a total of 38,723 GO terms, detected 24,349 domains, and identified 3354 homologous enzyme-related sequences. 3,072 contigs had all three levels of annotation.
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