De novo assembly, characterization of tissue-specific transcriptomes and identification of immune related genes from the scallop Argopecten purpuratus

Abstract

The scallop Argopecten purpuratus is one of the most economically important cultured mollusks on the coasts from Chile and Peru but its production has declined, in part, due to the emergence of mass mortality events of unknown origin. Driven by this scenario, increasing progress has been made in recent years in the comprehension of immune response mechanisms in this species. However, it is still not entirely understood how different mucosal interfaces participate and cooperate with the immune competent cells, the hemocytes, in the immune defense. Thus, in this work we aimed to characterize the transcriptome of three tissues with immune relevance from A. purpuratus by next-generation sequencing and de novo transcriptome assembly. For this, 18 cDNA libraries were constructed from digestive gland, gills and hemocytes tissues of scallops from different immune conditions and sequenced by the Illumina HiSeq4000 platform. A total of 967.964.884 raw reads were obtained and 967.432.652 clean reads were generated. The clean reads were de novo assembled into 46.601 high quality contigs and 32.299 (69.31%) contigs were subsequently annotated. In addition, three de novo specific assemblies were performed from clean reads obtained from each tissue cDNA libraries for their comparison. Gene ontology (GO) and KEGG analyses revealed that annotated sequences from digestive gland, gills and hemocytes could be classified into both general and specific subcategory terms and known biological pathways, respectively, according to the tissue nature. Finally, several immune related candidate genes were identified, and the differential expression of tissue-specific genes was established, suggesting they could display specific roles in the host defense. The data presented in this study provide the first insight into the tissue specific transcriptome profiles of A. purpuratus, which should be considered for further research on the interplay between the hemocytes and mucosal immune responses.