Abstract
The swimming crab Portunus trituberculatus is a commercially important crab species in East Asia countries. Gonadal development is a physiological process of great significance to the reproduction as well as commercial seed production for P. trituberculatus. However, little is currently known about the molecular mechanisms governing the developmental processes of gonads in this species. To open avenues of molecular research on P. trituberculatus gonadal development, Illumina paired-end sequencing technology was employed to develop deep-coverage transcriptome sequencing data for its gonads. Illumina sequencing generated 58,429,148 and 70,474,978 high-quality reads from the ovary and testis cDNA library, respectively. All these reads were assembled into 54,960 unigenes with an average sequence length of 879 bp, of which 12,340 unigenes (22.45% of the total) matched sequences in GenBank non-redundant database. Based on our transcriptome analysis as well as published literature, a number of candidate genes potentially involved in the regulation of gonadal development of P. trituberculatus were identified, such as FAOMeT, mPRγ, PGMRC1, PGDS, PGER4, 3β-HSD and 17β-HSDs. Differential expression analysis generated 5,919 differentially expressed genes between ovary and testis, among which many genes related to gametogenesis and several genes previously reported to be critical in differentiation and development of gonads were found, including Foxl2, Wnt4, Fst, Fem-1 and Sox9. Furthermore, 28,534 SSRs and 111,646 high-quality SNPs were identified in this transcriptome dataset. This work represents the first transcriptome analysis of P. trituberculatus gonads using the next generation sequencing technology and provides a valuable dataset for understanding molecular mechanisms controlling development of gonads and facilitating future investigation of reproductive biology in this species. The molecular markers obtained in this study will provide a fundamental basis for population genetics and functional genomics in P. trituberculatus and other closely related species.
Highlights
The swimming crab Portunus trituberculatus (Crustacea: Decapoda: Brachyura) is a commercially important crab species widely distributed in the estuary and coastal areas of Korea, Japan, China, and Southeast Asia [1]
In order to obtain an overview of gonad transcriptome of P. trituberculatus and identify genes involved in gonadal development, two cDNA libraries were prepared from pooled RNA extracts of ovary and testis at different development stages and sequenced using the Illumina Solexa platform
All the reads were deposited in the Short Read Archive (SRA) of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) with the accession number SRR1920180 and SRR1920182
Summary
The swimming crab Portunus trituberculatus (Crustacea: Decapoda: Brachyura) is a commercially important crab species widely distributed in the estuary and coastal areas of Korea, Japan, China, and Southeast Asia [1] This species is predominant in portunid crabs fisheries around the world and supports a large aquaculture industry in China. Over the past few decades, extensive studies have been carried out and a variety of regulatory factors, such as methyl farnesoate, ecdysteroids, crustacean hyperglycemic hormones, biogenic amines and vertebrate-type steroids, have been identified and investigated in numerous crustacean species [3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13] These studies have revealed a good picture of endocrine regulation for reproductive processes in crustacean species, the molecular mechanisms controlling gonadal development still remains poorly understood. No data is currently available on the gonad transcriptome of P. trituberculatus
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