De novo transcriptomic profile in the gonadal tissues of the intertidal whelk Reishia clavigera

Abstract

The intertidal whelk Reishia clavigera (formerly named as Thais clavigera) is one of the most sensitive species suffering from organotin-associated imposex in their females. However, limited information of mRNA transcriptome has restricted the molecular investigation on such endocrine disruption in this species. By means of Illumina sequencing, we obtained a global de novo transcriptome from the gonadal tissues from both male and female of R. clavigera, with 197,324 assembled transcripts and 151,684 condensed non-redundant transcripts. A blast hit results from the NCBI’s non-redundant molluscan database showed that 28,948 transcripts were successfully annotated with significant matches at an e-value of ≤ 1e-6. Among them, 1,108 transcripts were assigned to a well-defined gene ontology term. This first transcriptomic study on the gonadal tissues of R. clavigera has generated the fundamental information of mRNA transcriptome that paves the path for mechanistic studies of chemical contaminants (e.g., organotins) on this common biomonitor species.