DOI: 10.5061/dryad.743p5
title: Data from: Characterizing the reproductive transcriptomic correlates of acute dehydration in males in the desert-adapted rodent, Peromyscus eremicus

description: Background: The understanding of genomic and physiological mechanisms
 related to how organisms living in extreme environments survive and
 reproduce is an outstanding question facing evolutionary and organismal
 biologists. One interesting example of adaptation is related to the
 survival of mammals in deserts, where extreme water limitation is common.
 Research on desert rodent adaptations has focused predominantly on
 adaptations related to surviving dehydration, while potential reproductive
 physiology adaptations for acute and chronic dehydration have been
 relatively neglected. This study aims to explore the reproductive
 consequences of acute dehydration by utilizing RNAseq data in the
 desert-specialized cactus mouse (Peromyscus eremicus). Results: We exposed
 22 male cactus mice to either acute dehydration or control (fully
 hydrated) treatment conditions, quasimapped testes-derived reads to a
 cactus mouse testes transcriptome, and then evaluated patterns of
 differential transcript and gene expression. Following statistical
 evaluation with multiple analytical pipelines, nine genes were
 consistently differentially expressed between the hydrated and dehydrated
 mice. We hypothesized that male cactus mice would exhibit minimal
 reproductive responses to dehydration; therefore, this low number of
 differentially expressed genes between treatments aligns with current
 perceptions of this species’ extreme desert specialization. However, these
 differentially expressed genes include Insulin-like 3 (Insl3), a regulator
 of male fertility and testes descent, as well as the solute carriers
 Slc45a3 and Slc38a5, which are membrane transport proteins that may
 facilitate osmoregulation. Conclusions: These results suggest that in male
 cactus mice, acute dehydration may be linked to reproductive modulation
 via Insl3, but not through gene expression differences in the subset of
 other a priori tested reproductive hormones. Although water availability
 is a reproductive cue in desert-rodents exposed to chronic drought,
 potential reproductive modification via Insl3 in response to acute
 water-limitation is a result which is unexpected in an animal capable of
 surviving and successfully reproducing year-round without available
 external water sources. Indeed, this work highlights the critical need for
 integrative research that examines every facet of organismal adaptation,
 particularly in light of global climate change, which is predicted,
 amongst other things, to increase climate variability, thereby exposing
 desert animals more frequently to the acute drought conditions explored
 here.
description: DTEno-matchBLASTnSequencesThis markdown file includes the BLASTnSequencing results for the DTE analysis (the sequences without matches)NEWESTFinalMUSGene ID by Transcript ID matrixNEWmergedcountsSalmon merged quant filegood.BINPACKER.cdhit.fasta.dammit.gff3Dammit gff3 file of annotation Dammit gff3 file of annotationgood.BINPACKER.cdhit.fasta.dammit.fastaAnnotated transcriptomegood.BINPACKER.cdhit.fastaOptimized final un-annotated transcriptomehighENSM.csvAccession ID file for PANTHER: relatively high DRY expression gene listhighENSMgoLIST.txtPANTHER GO List results for relatively high DRY expression gene listlowENSM.csvAccession ID file for PANTHER: relatively high WET expression gene listlowENSMgoLIST.txtPANTHER GO List Results for relatively high WET expression gene listsalmon filesSalmon folder including salmon quant outputs for 22 individuals (salmon)salmon.ziptestesDGE-master 2Markdown files for analyses from GitHub site: https://github.com/macmanes-lab/testesDGE