Figure 1.
Monotremes and their crural glands.
1) An echidna (image taken from http://faunafemales.wikispaces.com/Echidna) and a dissected crural gland-spur apparatus from an adult male echidna. Photo was taken by William Krause and reprinted with permission from reference 2. Note that the main duct linking the crural gland and spur is shorter in the echidna than in the platypus. The spur (highlighted by an arrow) is not able to be erected in the echidna. 2) A platypus (image taken from http://faunafemales.wikispaces.com/Platypuses) and a dissected gland-spur apparatus taken from an adult male platypus. The original photograph was published by Krause in reference 2 (licence number 3184480567659).
Figure 2.
Schematic of bioinformatics workflow for the assembly, annotation and quantitation of echidna transcripts.
Table 1.
Echidna transcripts that display higher similarity to known toxins than human proteins.
Table 2.
Known platypus venom proteins and their homologs in the echidna transcriptome.
Table 3.
The most highly expressed proteins in the echidna transcriptome as annotated by platypus Ensembl proteins.
Table 4.
Gene ontology (GO) terms that were enriched in the top 200 most highly expressed echidna genes compared to the platypus using GoStat2.