Abstract
BackgroundThe Mediterranean mussel Mytilus galloprovincialis is marine bivalve with a relevant commercial importance as well as a key sentinel organism for the biomonitoring of environmental pollution. Here we report the RNA sequencing of the mussel digestive gland, performed with the aim: a) to produce a high quality de novo transcriptome assembly, thus improving the genetic and molecular knowledge of this organism b) to provide an initial assessment of the response to paralytic shellfish poisoning (PSP) on a molecular level, in order to identify possible molecular markers of toxin accumulation.ResultsThe comprehensive de novo assembly and annotation of the transcriptome yielded a collection of 12,079 non-redundant consensus sequences with an average length of 958 bp, with a high percentage of full-length transcripts. The whole-transcriptome gene expression study indicated that the accumulation of paralytic toxins produced by the dinoflagellate Alexandrium minutum over a time span of 5 days scarcely affected gene expression, but the results need further validation with a greater number of biological samples and naturally contaminated specimens.ConclusionThe digestive gland reference transcriptome we produced significantly improves the data collected from previous sequencing efforts and provides a basic resource for expanding functional genomics investigations in M. galloprovincialis. Although not conclusive, the results of the RNA-seq gene expression analysis support the classification of mussels as bivalves refractory to paralytic shellfish poisoning and point out that the identification molecular biomarkers of PSP in the digestive gland of this organism is problematic.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/1756-0500-7-722) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Highlights
The Mediterranean mussel Mytilus galloprovincialis is marine bivalve with a relevant commercial importance as well as a key sentinel organism for the biomonitoring of environmental pollution
The digestive gland-focused sequence data generated by RNA-seq in the present study provide a limited view of the entire complement of transcripts expressed in different tissues, different life stages and in response to many biotic and abiotic stimuli in M. galloprovincialis, we expected to obtain a good coverage for a broad range of transcripts due to the high sequencing depth applied
The sequencing data generated in this study allowed the global assembly of the M. galloprovincialis digestive gland transcriptome
Summary
The Mediterranean mussel Mytilus galloprovincialis is marine bivalve with a relevant commercial importance as well as a key sentinel organism for the biomonitoring of environmental pollution. We report the RNA sequencing of the mussel digestive gland, performed with the aim: a) to produce a high quality de novo transcriptome assembly, improving the genetic and molecular knowledge of this organism b) to provide an initial assessment of the response to paralytic shellfish poisoning (PSP) on a molecular level, in order to identify possible molecular markers of toxin accumulation. Besides the undeniable usefulness of RNA-seq as a tool for de novo transcriptome assembly and analysis, such approach provides a far more precise gene expression measurement than other methods [13], overcoming most of the technical limitations of cDNA microarrays which have been used for quite a long time as the gold standard for large scale gene expression studies in most organisms, including mussels [14]. We highlight the potential usefulness of the resulting reference transcriptome by exploring the case study of the mussel response to Paralytic Shellfish Poisoning (PSP) through the comparison of the transcription profiles of DG samples from animals fed with toxigenic or nontoxigenic strains of the dinoflagellate Alexandrium minutum over 5 days
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