DOI: 10.5061/dryad.rxwdbrvcp
title: Data from: Transcriptomic responses to the consumption of nuptial food gifts by female decorated crickets

description: Nuptial food gifts offered by males to females at mating are shaped by
 sexual conflict, allowing males direct access to female physiology.
 However, a molecular dissection of their effect on females is rare. In
 decorated crickets, the male’s nuptial gift comprises part of the male’s
 spermatophore, the spermatophylax, which functions to deter the female
 from prematurely removing the sperm-containing portion, the ampulla, from
 her genital opening. However, ingested spermatophylax compounds and
 proteins contained in the ampulla could also influence female physiology
 and behavior to the male’s benefit. We investigated how mating per se and
 these two distinct routes of potential male-mediated manipulation
 influence the transcriptional response of females. We conducted an
 RNA-sequencing experiment on the gut and head tissue from females for whom
 consumption of nuptial food gifts and receipt of an ejaculate had been
 independently manipulated. In the gut tissue, we found that females not
 permitted to feed during mating exhibit a decreased expression of many
 genes, which seems to be caused by reduced gut function, but this was
 countered by female feeding on the spermatophylax or a sham gift. In the
 head tissue, we found only low numbers of differentially expressed genes,
 but a gene co-expression network analysis revealed that both the
 attachment of the ampulla and the consumption of the spermatophylax
 independently induce their own distinct patterns of gene expression. This
 study provides evidence that spermatophylax feeding alters the female
 post-mating transcriptomic response in decorated crickets, highlighting
 its potential to mediate sexual conflict in this system.
description: Transcriptomes were assembled with Trinity and sare deposited at
 DDBJ/EMBL/GenBank under the bioproject PRJNA784797. 
 They were annotated using the Trinotate pipeline. Transcripts
 were translated into their most likely coding regions, if any, using
 Transdecoder. Both the resulting protein products and all original
 transcripts were used to find similar sequences in the Swiss-Prot protein
 database, using either BLASTP or BLASTX with a threshold of E ≤ 10−5.
 Signal peptides, transmembrane helices and protein domains were predicted
 using SignalP v4.1, tmhmm v2.0 and HMERR with the PFAM database,
 respectively.  The results, in addition to KEGG,
 Eggnog, and Gene Ontology (GO) annotations were parsed by Trinotate and
 stored in a SQLite database. The two CSV files were exported from such
 SQLite databases, and include all annotations found by
 Trinotate. All real-time quantitative PCR (qPCR)
 experiments were performed following the MIQE guidelines for qPCR
 experiments. For each qPCR reaction, 2 µL of cDNA was added to 10 µL of
 Power SYBR™ Green PCR Master Mix (Fisher #4368702), 6.8 µL of H2O, and 1.2
 µL of primers at a final concentration of 300 nM. All reactions were run
 in duplicate on 96 well plates, using the following thermal cycling
 profile on a QuantStudio 3 Real-Time PCR system (Thermo Fisher
 Scientific): 2 minutes at 50°C, 10 minutes at 95°C, 40 cycles of (1) 15
 seconds at 95°C and (2) 1 min at 60°C, and a melting curve from 95°C to
 60°C. We assessed the relative expression of six target genes (Hinfp,
 Ubtf, Nup93, Vg2, SLC35B3 and Rassf8) in the four experimental groups (SA,
 A, S, V).
description: All data files are saved as .csv files and can be opened with any
 text editor.