De novo assembly and annotation of the grey reindeer lichen (Cladonia rangiferina) transcriptome

Abstract

Lichen is a symbiotic relationship between a fungus and an alga, and these organisms have a remarkable ability to survive in some of the harshest climates on earth. We report the de novo assembly and annotation of the transcriptome of the grey reindeer lichen, Cladonia rangiferina, using high-throughput next generation sequencing and traditional Sanger sequencing data. High quality sequence reads from a Roche GS FLX sequencing run and Sanger sequencing were de novo assembled. The genome of origin for the lichen sequences was predicted and the assembled sequences were annotated using BLASTX analysis against the non-redundant database. The C. rangiferina transcriptome was further characterised by functional annotation of the sequences against GO and KEGG databases. Our results present the first transcriptome sequencing and de novo assembly of any lichen species, describe the ongoing molecular processes and the most active pathways in C. rangiferina, and bring a significant increase to publicly available lichen sequence information.