A Multi‐Tissue Transcriptomic Resource for the Brahminy Blindsnake Indotyphlops braminus (Squamata: Typhlopidae)

ABSTRACT

The Brahminy blindsnake ( Indotyphlops braminus ), an all‐female, parthenogenetic, and triploid snake, is an informative species for studying polyploidy and asexual reproduction in vertebrates. In this study, we analyzed tissue expression patterns in I. braminus using a PacBio‐derived transcript reference and Illumina RNA‐seq. Differential expression and annotation over‐representation analyses were used to characterize tissue‐associated expression differences and over‐represented annotations across ovary, heart, liver, and skin from the same three individuals. The three overlapping eye‐spot pools were described at the library level. Weighted gene co‐expression network analysis (WGCNA) was used only as an exploratory analysis of the 12 four‐tissue libraries. A total of 835,353,682 clean read pairs were retained, and gene expression profiles showed broad differences among the four formally analyzed tissues. Of 30,224 tested genes, 13,849 showed a tissue effect, and 4228 candidate tissue‐enriched genes were identified by requiring higher expression in all three relevant pairwise comparisons. Six representative annotation terms remained significant in the sensitivity analysis, and 3 of 11 non‐gray co‐expression modules passed the prespecified stability rule across nine alternative networks. This study provides an additional multi‐tissue transcriptomic resource for I. braminus , with candidate sets that can guide future functional and comparative tests of hypotheses concerning parthenogenesis, triploidy, fossoriality, and visual reduction.