Comparative analysis of transcriptome responses to injected somatostatin 3 peptide in spotted scat (Scatophagus argus)

Spotted scat (Scatophagus argus) is a popular farmed marine fish with high economic value, distributed widely in East Asia. Somatostatin (SST) is a hormone secreted by the hypothalamus to inhibit the growth of fish. Previous in vitro studies confirmed that somatostatin 3 (sst3) could inhibit the mRNA expression of insulin-like growth factors 1 and 2 (igf-1 and igf-2) in the liver of spotted scat. This study aimed to characterize transcriptome changes from the pituitary and liver of spotted scat induced by somatostatin 3 (SST3) peptide in vivo. We obtained a total of 632.6 million clean reads. In the pituitary and liver, we obtained 137 and 1127 different expressed genes (DEGs), respectively. Functions of annotated genes were classified by Gene Ontology (GO) and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) analyses. Most DEGs were annotated to the pathways of metabolism, organismal systems and human diseases. Among them, the DEGs were significantly enriched in the growth axis (ghitm, ghr1, igfbp-1 and igfbp-2), glycolysis/gluconeogenesis (g6pc, aldoa, gapdh and adh5) and pyruvate metabolism (pck2, acat2 and acss). The large number of transcriptome sequences obtained in this study has enriched the spotted scat gene resources, and DEGs and related pathway analyses have provided valuable information for understanding the growth regulation of the spotted scat.