Characterization of Nibea albiflora Transcriptome: Sequencing, De Novo Assembly, Annotation and Comparative Genomics

Nibea albiflora is an economically and ecologically important fish species, which is widely distributed from South China Sea to the coastal water of Japan and Korea. Due to the economical and ecological importance of N. albiflora, genomic data are eagerly needed for genetic improvement. However, there is still no sufficient transcriptome data available for such valruable species. Therefore, presently transcriptome was sequenced deeply to provide well-assembled transcriptome sequences to N. albiflera research community. A total of 0,367,046 cleaned reads (78%) were obtained and were assembled, a total of 48,255 contigs ranging from 201 to 16,026, bp in length were generated. The average length was 725 bp, the N50 length was 1,279 bp. In result of assembled contigs, compared with the NCBI non-redundant (nr) protein database, a total of 19,027 contigs had a significant hit, corresponding to 13,743 unique protein accessions in the nr protein database. Top-Hit species distribution was then investigated, the Maylandia zebra is the species that returned the most BLAST hits with N. albiflora contigs, followed by Oreochromis niloticus and Takifugu rubripes. The contigs of the N. albiflora transcriptome had hits with 26.2% to 44-.3% of the unique proteins of fugu, zebrafish, three-spined stickleback, medaka. In further, the cDNA SSR and SNP loci were identified for future marker development and genetic analysis. In the present investigation, the transcriptome of N. albiflora had been deeply sequenced, assembled and characterized,. providing a valuable resource for abetter understanding of the. albiflora genome.