Data on the de novo transcriptome assembly for the migratory bird, the Common quail (Coturnix coturnix)

The Common or European quail (Coturnix coturnix) is a Galliform bird of ecological importance for research in the field of animal migration. The Common quail is also a game bird, thus, of great interest for recreational activities and conservation management. Here, we generated a high quality de novo transcriptome for the Common quail for which no reference genome is to date publicly available. The transcriptome was obtained from a population of Common quail originated from captive founders raised under laboratory conditions. Paired-end RNA-Sequencing reads were obtained from extracted total RNA of brain tissue punches (preoptic-hypothalamic region) of 23 quails, which yielded to 5.5–11.2 million reads per individual bird for a total of 236 million reads. After assembly optimization, we used a stringent filtering analysis pipeline to remove redundant and low confidence transcripts. The final transcriptome consisted of 22,293 transcripts of which 21,551 (97%) were provided with annotation data. Our data offers a high quality pipeline for compiling transcriptomes of complex non-genomic species. Our data also provide a robust reference for gene expression studies in this species or other related Galliform species, including the Japanese quail.