Tissue biopsies were obtained from two male bowhead whales harvested by Inupiat hunters at Barrow, Alaska during the Fall hunt of 2010; heart, cerebellum, liver, and testes were biopsied from male bowhead number 10B16, and retina from male bowhead 10B20. Samples were immediately placed in liquid nitrogen and transported in a dry shipper to Purdue University. RNA was extracted using TRIZOL reagent (Invitrogen) following the manufacturer’s protocol. RNA was purified using an Invitrogen PureLink Micro-to-Midi columns from the Total RNA Purification System using the standard protocol. RNA quantity and quality was estimated with a spectrophotometer (Nanodrop) and by gel electrophoresis using an Agilent model 2100 Bioanalyzer. cDNA libraries were constructed by random priming of chemically sheared poly A captured RNA. Randomly primed DNA products were blunt ended. Products from 450–650 bp were then isolated using a PippenPrep. After the addition of an adenine to the fragments, a Y primer amplification was used to produce properly tailed products. Paired-end sequences of 100 bp per end were generated using the Illumina HiScan platform. Sequences with primer concatamers, weak signal, and/or poly A/T tails were culled. The Trinity software package for de novo assembly (Grabherr et al., 2011 (link)) was used for transcript reconstruction (Table S1 ).
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