De novo transcriptome assembly of Iphiculus spongiosus Adams & White, 1849 (Decapoda; Brachyura; Leucosioidea) using full-length isoform sequencing

Abstract

Brachyura play a key role in linking food energy transfer in marine benthic ecosystems. Hence, the health and sustainability of benthic ecosystems come from the maintenance of crab diversity, and systematic studies should be performed. Recently, although mitochondrial genomes have been widely used in brachyuran phylogeny, the systematic reconstruction of leucosiid crabs has mainly depended on museum specimens due to the lack of live specimens and reference databases. Here, therefore, the selected ribonucleic acid (RNA) was isolated from Iphiculus spongiosus for long-read, single molecule sequencing based on the PacBio full-length isoform sequencing (ISO-seq) platform. A total of 173,863 high-quality consensus isoforms were obtained with a total sequencing length of 210,170,210 bp. Performing functional annotation by including seven general databases revealed a total of 73,809 transcripts (based on the identified coding region sequences), of which the total length was 56,483,844 bp. These results represent the first RNA sequencing data of the leucosiid group. They can contribute to the de novo transcriptome assembly of a reference database and could aid the development of genetic probes to aid target sequence capture in future taxonomic studies.