Meeting Abstract
The green treefrog, Hyla cinerea, is a unique model for studying vocal behavior. Having only one sex vocalize (male) allows us to identify traits that are specific to vocal production at a variety of levels. Furthermore, in this species, both calling and several aspects of auditory processing vary seasonally, and are sensitive to circulating hormone levels and social experience in addition to sex differences. We have begun to address what defines a vocal animal from the molecular and genetic level. In doing so we have produced a brain transcriptome. Transcriptome generation is a powerful diagnostic tool for understanding the role of gene expression in regulating behavior. The transcriptome for the treefrog brain was assembled from a total of 275 million bases and has an average contig length of 964 bases across 285,448 contigs. Prior to annotation contigs were BLASTed and reduced to those hits that returned with an E-value of 10-5 or less. A total of 90,000 contigs were processed through Blast2GO and 74,000 were successfully annotated. This transcriptome represents the entire adult brain of H. cinerea including both males and females. Additional assembly to identify gene expression patterns characterizing each sex and each of three major brain areas (forebrain, midbrain, and hindbrain) is in progress. This approach will enable us to target and measure specific genes relating to vocalization using both qPCR and in-situ hybridization. This work is supported by the GSU Brains & Behavior area of focus.
