Project description:The nematode Auanema rhodensis is trioecious (co-occurrence of males, females and self-fertile hermaphrodites). To better understand its sex determination system, we have compared the transcriptomic profiles of early (L2) females, hermaphrodites and converted females (hermaphrodite-fated larvae induced to develop as females). Additionally, we sequenced the transcriptome of adult males and individuals from various stages and sexes (mixed stages samples) to compare global gene expression profiles along the assembled draft chromosomes of A. rhodensis (BioProject PRJEB29492). The RNA-seq data was also used to predict genes in the assembled genome. We generated three biological replicates for each RNA-seq condition (L2 females, L2 converted females, L2 hermaphrodites, males and mixed stages). Comparisons of the expression profiles of the L2 conditions was performed to identify genes potentially involved in the sexual differentiation process, using a standard RNA-seq comparison approach. Briefly, the cleaned reads were aligned to the genome using STAR, the abundance and identification of differentially expressed genes were assessed using FeatureCounts and DEseq2 (using as thresholds an absolute log2(Fold Change) >= 2 and an FDR <0.01).
