Hypothesis-driven dragging of transcriptomic data to analyze proven targeted pathways in Rhinella arenarum larvae exposed to organophosphorus pesticides.

Transcriptional analysis of the network of transcription regulators and target pathways in exposed organisms may be a hard task when their genome remains unknown. The development of hundreds of qPCR assays, including primer design and normalization of the results with the appropriate housekeeping genes, seems an unreachable task. Alternatively, we took advantage of a whole transcriptome study on Rhinella arenarum larvae exposed to the organophosphorus pesticides azinphos-methyl and chlorpyrifos to evaluate the transcriptional effects on a priori selected groups of genes.

The Rhinella arenarum transcriptome: de novo assembly, annotation and gene prediction.

The common toad Rhinella arenarum is widely distributed in Argentina, where it is utilised as an autochthonous model in ecotoxicological research and environmental toxicology. However, the lack of a reference genome makes molecular assays and gene expression studies difficult to carry out on this non-model species. To address this issue, we performed a genome-wide transcriptome analysis on R.