Salamandra salamandra

 Dispersal is a key process in ecology and evolutionary biology, as it shapes biodiversity patterns over space and time. Mounting evidence is showing that attitude to disperse is unevenly distributed among individuals within animal populations, and that individual personality can have pivotal roles in the shaping of this attitude. Here, we contribute to the study of the genetic underpinnings of dispersal-related behavioral variation by assembling and annotating the first de novo transcriptome of the head tissues of Salamandra salamandra. Although dispersal occurs mostly during the post-metamorphic terrestrial life stage in this species, variation in dispersal-related personality traits is already evident at the aquatic larval stage, making it an excellent candidate species for studies of carry-over effects. We employed a structured pipeline to de-novo assemble and annotate transcripts from RNA-Seq in a set of individuals representative of distinct behavioral profiles. We obtained 1,153,432,918 reads, which were successfully de novo assembled and annotated. The high-quality assembly was confirmed by comparing BUSCO, DETONATE and TransRate with the S. salamandra dataset. By aligning the contigs against the de novo transcriptome we obtained a percentage of mapping higher than 94%. The homology annotation performed with DIAMOND led to 153,048 (blastx) and 95,942 (blastp) shared contigs, annotated on NCBI nr, Swiss-Prot and TrEMBL. The domain and site protein prediction made with InterProScan led to 9850 GO-annotated contigs. This de-novo transcriptome represents reliable reference for whole transcriptome and proteome studies of other amphibians, for designing primers to clone specific genes or monitor their expression, and for analyzing comparative gene expression profiles between alternative behavioral types.