Investigating Differential Expression on Birds from Mongolia Based on Aridity

Abstract

The Mongolian climate has a division between northern and southern locations based on arid environmental variables: mean annual temperature and precipitation. This study used RNA-seq data from three different species and tissue types to test for differential gene expression. There were nine combinations of species and tissue types and all but one had at least one differentially expressed gene. One combination had significant differences in expression based on northern and southern locations, the Daurian Redstart (Phoenicurus auroreus) and muscle tissue with 800 differentially expressed genes at p.05 significance. The findings demonstrate that there is differential expression based on aridity for at least one species and tissue from Mongolia.