InSexBase: an annotated genomic resource of sex chromosomes and sex-biased genes in insects

AbstractSex determination and the regulation of sexual dimorphism are among the most fascinating topics in modern biology. As the most species-rich group of sexually reproducing organisms on Earth, insects have multiple sex determination systems. Though sex chromosomes and sex-biased genes are well-studied in dozens of insects, their gene sequences are scattered in various databases. Moreover, a shortage of annotation hinders the deep mining of these data. Here, we collected the chromosome-level sex chromosome data of 49 insect species, including 34 X chromosomes, 15 Z chromosomes, 5 W chromosomes and 2 Y chromosomes. We also obtained Y-linked contigs of four insects species —Anopheles gambiae, Drosophila innubila, Drosophila yakuba andTribolium castaneum. The unannotated chromosome-level sex chromosomes were annotated using a standard pipeline, yielding a total of 123  030 protein-coding genes, 2 159 427 repeat sequences, 894 miRNAs, 1574 rRNAs, 5105 tRNAs, 395 snoRNAs (small nucleolar RNA), 54 snRNAs (small nuclear RNA) and 5959 other ncRNAs (non-coding RNA). In addition, 36 781 sex-biased genes were identified by analyzing 62 RNA-seq (RNA sequencing) da tasets. Together with 5707 sex-biased genes from theDrosophila genus collected from the Sex-Associated Gene Database, we obtained a total of 42  488 sex-biased genes from 13 insect species. All these data were deposited into InSexBase, a new user-friendly database of insect sex chromosomes and sex-biased genes.D...
Source: Database : The Journal of Biological Databases and Curation - Category: Databases & Libraries Source Type: research