Jaws are among the most highly adapted and modified structures of vertebrates, and they facilitate complex behaviors like feeding, respiration, and vocalization. For this reason, precise developmental regulation of jaw length is crucial for survival. By comparing jaw development between white Pekin duck (Anas platyrhynchos domestica), Japanese quail (Coturnix coturnix japonica), and chick (Gallus gallus) we have shown in prior work that neural crest mesenchyme (NCM), which is the embryonic progenitor population that gives rise to the jaw skeleton, employs a variety of stage- and species-specific mechanisms to govern jaw length. Duck have much longer jaws compared to those of quail, and during the early migration of NCM from the anterior neural tube, duck embryos allocate more progenitors to the presumptive jaw region. Once these NCM populations arrive, their growth trajectories further diverge due to autonomous molecular programs for proliferation and differentiation that are tied to intrinsic rates of maturation and species-specific regulation of multiple-signaling pathways.

To analyze the species-specific differential expression and regulation of the signaling pathways, which direct jaw morphology, we performed an RNA-seq experiment on chick, quail, and duck mandibular primordia at stage (HH) 37. To increase the spatial resolution the lower jaws were dissected into proximal and distal portions. Oxford Nanopore Technology sequencing was used to preserve the full-length mRNA sequence so that spatial and species-specific differences in the distribution of isoforms could be assayed.

Data are sequencing results from long read Oxford Nanopore PromethION RNA seq of the distal and proximal portions of mandibular primordia at embryonic stage (HH) 37. Data are in FASTQ file format that have been Gzipped. If necessary, 7-Zip can be used to unzip the files. Software that can read FASTQ files should be able to open this dataset.