DOI: 10.5061/dryad.fj34d
title: Data from: Neuroendocrine profiles associated with discrete behavioural variation in Symphodus ocellatus, a species with male alternative reproductive tactics

description: The molecular mechanisms underlying phenotypic plasticity are not well
 understood. Identifying mechanisms underlying alternative reproductive
 tactics (ARTs) in species for which the behavioural and fitness
 consequences of this variation are well characterized provides an
 opportunity to integrate evolutionary and mechanistic understanding of the
 maintenance of variation within populations. In the ocellated wrasse
 Symphodus ocellatus, the behavioural phenotypes of three distinct male
 morphs (sneakers, satellites and nesting males), which arise from a single
 genome, have been thoroughly characterized. To determine the
 neuroendocrine and genomic mechanisms associated with discrete phenotypic
 variation and ARTs in S. ocellatus in their natural environment, we
 constructed a whole-brain de novo transcriptome and compared global
 patterns of gene expression between sexes and male morphs. Next, we
 quantified circulating cortisol and 11-ketotestosterone (11-kt), mediators
 of male reproductive behaviours, as well as stress and gonadal steroid
 hormone receptor expression in the preoptic area, ventral subpallial
 division of the telencephalon and dorsolateral telencephalon, critical
 brain regions for social and reproductive behaviours. We found higher
 levels of 11-kt in nesting males and higher levels of cortisol in sneaker
 males relative to other male morphs and females. We also identified
 distinct patterns of brain region-specific hormone receptor expression
 between males such that most hormone receptors are more highly expressed
 in satellites and nesting males relative to sneakers and females. Our
 results establish the neuroendocrine and molecular mechanisms that
 underlie ARTs in the wild and provide a foundation for experimentally
 testing hypotheses about the relationship between neuromolecular processes
 and reproductive success.
description: Whole Brain
 Transcriptome for S. ocellatusDe novo transcriptome
 assembly was performed using Trinity (Haas et al. 2013) using RNA-Seq
 reads from male (sneaker, satellite, and nesting male) and female S.
 ocellatus whole brain mRNA. Lowly-abundant transcripts with an FPKM &lt;
 0.5 were filtered by RSEM, resulting in an assembly with 80,103 contigs
 with an N50 of 2119. To annotate the S. ocellatus transcriptome we
 employed Blastx (using an E-value cutoff of 1X10-10) on protein sequences
 for Oryzias latipes and Takifugu rubripes obtained from the Ensembl
 BioMart database, which resulted in the alignment of 25,856 contigs to the
 O. latipes genome and 25,213 contigs to the T. rubripes genome. Contigs
 that aligned with high confidence to more than one database were annotated
 based on the lowest E value and highest % identity to either reference
 genome, resulting in an assembly where roughly 32% of high quality contigs
 were successfully annotated. Contigs without annotations are labelled with
 contig tags generated by Trinity while annotated contigs have gene symbol
 following contig tags.annotated.fastaRSEM filtered assemblyRSEM.annotated.fasta