The testis and ovary transcriptomes of the rock bream (Oplegnathus fasciatus): A bony fish with a unique neo Y chromosome

Abstract

The rock bream (Oplegnathus fasciatus) is considerably one of the most economically important marine fish in East Asia and has a unique neo-Y chromosome system that is a good model to study the sex determination and differentiation in fish. In the present study, we used Illumina sequencing technology (HiSeq2000) to sequence, assemble and annotate the transcriptome of the testis and ovary tissues of rock bream. A total of 40,004,378 (NCBI SRA database SRX1406649) and 53,108,992 (NCBI SRA database SRX1406648) high quality reads were obtained from testis and ovary RNA sequencing, respectively, and 60,421 contigs (with average length of 1301 bp) were obtained after de novo assembling with Trinity software. Digital gene expression analysis reveals 14,036 contigs that show gender-enriched expressional profile with either testis-enriched (237 contigs) or ovary-enriched (581 contigs) with RPKM >100. There are 237 male- and 582 female-abundant expressed genes that show sex dimorphic expression. We hope that the gonad transcriptome and those gender-enriched transcripts of rock bream can provide some insight into the understanding of genome-wide transcriptome profile of teleost gonad tissue and give useful information in fish gonad development. Keywords: Gonad transcriptome, Testis, Ovary, Rock bream