Abstract
BackgroundAs one of the most popular and valuable commercial marine fishes in China and East Asian countries, the Chinese black porgy (Acanthopagrus schlegelii), also known as the blackhead seabream, has some attractive characteristics such as fast growth rate, good meat quality, resistance to diseases, and excellent adaptability to various environments. Furthermore, the black porgy is a good model for investigating sex changes in fish due to its protandrous hermaphroditism. Here, we obtained a high-quality genome assembly of this interesting teleost species and performed a genomic survey on potential genes associated with the sex-change phenomenon.FindingsWe generated 175.4 gigabases (Gb) of clean sequence reads using a whole-genome shotgun sequencing strategy. The final genome assembly is approximately 688.1 megabases (Mb), accounting for 93% of the estimated genome size (739.6 Mb). The achieved scaffold N50 is 7.6 Mb, reaching a relatively high level among sequenced fish species. We identified 19 465 protein-coding genes, which had an average transcript length of 17.3 kb. By performing a comparative genomic analysis, we found 3 types of genes potentially associated with sex change, which are useful for studying the genetic basis of the protandrous hermaphroditism.ConclusionsWe provide a draft genome assembly of the Chinese black porgy and discuss the potential genetic mechanisms of sex change. These data are also an important resource for studying the biology and for facilitating breeding of this economically important fish.
Highlights
L. 148: ... and the final BUSCO score was up to 85.5% (C:85.5% [S:82.3%, D:3.2%], F:2.8%, M:11.7%, Actinopterygii gene set, n:4584). It would be helpful for the readers to define C, S, D, F, and M in the main text
That the authors have performed PhyML analyses and submitted results to GigaDB in support of the genes' actual orthologies, they would need to revise the table and provide individual rows for known vertebrate and teleost paralogs based on these phylogenetic trees, such as: wnt4a, wnt4b; sox9a, sox9b, etc
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Summary
Please indicate how interesting you found the manuscript: An article whose findings are important to those with closely related research interests Quality of Written English Please indicate the quality of language in the manuscript: Needs some language corrections before being published
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