Open AccessComparative Transcriptome Analysis Identifies Candidate Genes Related to Skin Color Differentiation in Red Tilapia
Author(s) -
Wenbin Zhu,
Lanmei Wang,
Zaijie Dong,
Xingting Chen,
Fei Song,
Nian Liu,
Hui Yang,
Jianjun Fu
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
scientific reports
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.24
H-Index - 213
ISSN - 2045-2322
DOI - 10.1038/srep31347
Subject(s) - biology , transcriptome , contig , tilapia , genetics , oreochromis , microsatellite , zebrafish , gene , computational biology , evolutionary biology , genome , allele , fish <actinopterygii> , fishery , gene expression
Red tilapia is becoming more popular for aquaculture production in China in recent years. However, the pigmentation differentiation in genetic breeding is the main problem limiting its development of commercial red tilapia culture and the genetic basis of skin color variation is still unknown. In this study, we conducted Illumina sequencing of transcriptome on three color variety red tilapia. A total of 224,895,758 reads were generated, resulting in 160,762 assembled contigs that were used as reference contigs. The contigs of red tilapia transcriptome had hits in the range of 53.4% to 86.7% of the unique proteins of zebrafish, fugu, medaka, three-spined stickleback and tilapia. And 44,723 contigs containing 77,423 simple sequence repeats (SSRs) were identified, with 16,646 contigs containing more than one SSR. Three skin transcriptomes were compared pairwise and the results revealed that there were 148 common significantly differentially expressed unigenes and several key genes related to pigment synthesis, i.e. tyr , tyrp1 , silv , sox10 , slc24a5 , cbs and slc7a11 , were included. The results will facilitate understanding the molecular mechanisms of skin pigmentation differentiation in red tilapia and accelerate the molecular selection of the specific strain with consistent skin colors.