The <i>de novo</i> transcriptome assembly and cloning pipeline.

<p>This pipeline has four key steps: (1) Sampling the suitable tissues. Target genes must be relatively highly expressed in the sampled tissues; (2) Transcriptome assembling. The <i>de novo</i> assembly is necessary to obtain the target gene whether we have the reference genome or not; (3) Alignment of the partial target gene protein/EST to the assembled transcripts. We used the reference OC-17 protein sequence (GenBank No.: Q9PRS8) to conduct tBLASTn against the assembled transcripts. (4) RACE. The last step is to use RACE to confirm the assembled transcripts and obtain the full-length cDNA.