In some cases, in addition to the expected size of transcripts, additional minor bands of higher molecular weight were observed.
In the normalized cDNA library, a large reduction in percentage of the abundant transcripts encoding seed storage proteins and a wider range in size of transcripts were observed.
Overall we found that the average transcript length for protein-coding gene is 1578 bp, roughly half the size of transcripts in the human transcriptome (2982 bp).
The range of the asymmetries is several hundreds kilo base pairs that is similar to average length of a replicon and one order of magnitude longer than the average size of transcripts (fig. 2).
Noteworthy, we did not detect significant differences in the size of transcripts between the Gu4 and Gu5 strains, with the notable and sole exception of TAC1 which presented an extension in 5' which was apparently specific for the azole resistant strain.
To investigate the size of transcripts synthesised from the bicistronic constructs, RNA was prepared using RNABee as described above and cDNA synthesised using Superscript II and random hexamers as described previously (McWilliams et al, 1998).
The number and total size of transcripts naturally vary for de novo assemblies of other species, such as in chickpea (55 k) transcripts (28 Mb) [ 27], Sonneratia alba, 30 k transcripts (18 Mb) [ 37] and Eucalyptus, 18 k transcripts (22 Mb) [ 30].
Similar observations have been reported by other studies [ 43] and were attributed to different factors, including the sensitivity of the different methods, cross-interference between transcripts because of the large size of transcripts examined together (multiplexing) and the quality of mRNA [ 44].
The presence of a few different sizes of transcript indicates that novel genes belong to the USP17 subfamily and that there are at least several members of this family present.
Variation in the sizes of transcripts from the same mt gene has been found in several studies [ 8, 9].
