PLoS ONE (Jan 2013)

Male-biased genes in catfish as revealed by RNA-Seq analysis of the testis transcriptome.

  • Fanyue Sun,
  • Shikai Liu,
  • Xiaoyu Gao,
  • Yanliang Jiang,
  • Dayan Perera,
  • Xiuli Wang,
  • Chao Li,
  • Luyang Sun,
  • Jiaren Zhang,
  • Ludmilla Kaltenboeck,
  • Rex Dunham,
  • Zhanjiang Liu

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0068452
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 8, no. 7
p. e68452

Abstract

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BACKGROUND: Catfish has a male-heterogametic (XY) sex determination system, but genes involved in gonadogenesis, spermatogenesis, testicular determination, and sex determination are poorly understood. As a first step of understanding the transcriptome of the testis, here, we conducted RNA-Seq analysis using high throughput Illumina sequencing. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: A total of 269.6 million high quality reads were assembled into 193,462 contigs with a N50 length of 806 bp. Of these contigs, 67,923 contigs had hits to a set of 25,307 unigenes, including 167 unique genes that had not been previously identified in catfish. A meta-analysis of expressed genes in the testis and in the gynogen (double haploid female) allowed the identification of 5,450 genes that are preferentially expressed in the testis, providing a pool of putative male-biased genes. Gene ontology and annotation analysis suggested that many of these male-biased genes were involved in gonadogenesis, spermatogenesis, testicular determination, gametogenesis, gonad differentiation, and possibly sex determination. CONCLUSION/SIGNIFICANCE: We provide the first transcriptome-level analysis of the catfish testis. Our analysis would lay the basis for sequential follow-up studies of genes involved in sex determination and differentiation in catfish.