Abstract
The giant freshwater prawn (Macrobrachium rosenbergii) exhibits sex dimorphism between the male and female individuals. To date, the molecular mechanism governing gonadal development was unclear, and limited data were available on the gonad transcriptome of M. rosenbergii. Here, we conducted comprehensive gonadal transcriptomic analysis of female (ZW), super female (WW), and male (ZZ) M. rosenbergii for gene discovery. A total of 70.33 gigabases (Gb) of sequences were generated. There were 115,338 unigenes assembled with a mean size of 1196 base pair (bp) and N50 of 2195 bp. Alignment against the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) non-redundant nucleotide/protein sequence database (NR and NT), the Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) database, SwissProt database, Protein family (Pfam), Gene ontology (GO), and the eukaryotic orthologous group (KOG) database, 36,282 unigenes were annotated at least in one database. Comparative transcriptome analysis observed that 10,641, 16,903, and 3393 genes were significantly differentially expressed in ZW vs. ZZ, WW vs. ZZ, and WW vs. ZW samples, respectively. Enrichment analysis of differentially expressed genes (DEGs) resulted in 268, 153, and 42 significantly enriched GO terms, respectively, and a total of 56 significantly enriched KEGG pathways. Additionally, 23 putative sex-related genes, including Gtsf1, IR, HSP21, MRPINK, Mrr, and other potentially promising candidate genes were identified. Moreover, 56,241 simple sequence repeats (SSRs) were identified. Our findings provide a valuable archive for further functional analyses of sex-related genes and future discoveries of underlying molecular mechanisms of gonadal development and sex determination.
Highlights
The giant freshwater prawn, Macrobrachium rosenbergii (M. rosenbergii), as an important commercial freshwater prawn species, is widely distributed in China and Southeast Asian countries due to itsGenes 2019, 10, 1035; doi:10.3390/genes10121035 www.mdpi.com/journal/genesGenes 2019, 10, 1035 delicious flesh and high value nutrition
All procedures were in compliance with the institutional guidelines and under a protocol approved by the Animal Experimental Ethical Inspection Form of Guangxi University (GXU2019-072)
For the WW individuals, they were achieved through a novel biotechnology with two steps: Females were sex-reversed into neo-males by injecting the suspended hypertrophied androgenic gland cells, crossing neo-males with normal females to validated WW
Summary
The giant freshwater prawn, Macrobrachium rosenbergii (M. rosenbergii), as an important commercial freshwater prawn species, is widely distributed in China and Southeast Asian countries due to itsGenes 2019, 10, 1035; doi:10.3390/genes10121035 www.mdpi.com/journal/genesGenes 2019, 10, 1035 delicious flesh and high value nutrition. M. rosenbergii displays sexual dimorphic growth pattern: The male individuals grow much larger and faster than the females [1,2]. Based on the economic impact, developing the monosex population culture as the efficient approach to boost production has received great attention from researchers in M. rosenbergii. The premise of monosex culture is to understand the molecular mechanism of sex determination, as well as to unravel sex-related genes. Studies on sex determination have proved that many macruran species exhibit the ZW/ZZ sex determination system [3,4,5]. In M. rosenbergii, sex reversal experiments proposed that the female prawns bear the ZW sex chromosomes, and the male individuals bear the ZZ chromosomes [1,6,7]
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