A de novo Reference Transcriptome of a Chicken-Original Virulent and Its Attenuated Histomonas meleagridis Strain in China

The protozoan flagellate Histomonas meleagridis is the causative agent of histomonosis in poultry. Although molecular data on it have been reported worldwide, relevant data from the Chinese region are still in a gap. To further enrich its genomic information, virulent and attenuated strains from Chinese chicken-origin into the de novo transcriptome sequencing of H. meleagridis were cultured in vitro as single mono-eukaryotic cultures. Using the DNBSEQ platform, this project resulted in a total of 35914 unigenes with an average length of 1408 bp after assembly and de redundancy. Alignment to the seven major functional databases for annotation resulted in 26330 (NR: 73.31%), 2233 (NT: 6.22%), 18410 (Swiss Prot: 51.26%), 17511 (KOG: 48.76%), 18454 (KEGG: 51.38%), 15531 (GO: 43.24%) and 23154 (Pfam: 64.47%) unigenes gain of function annotations, respectively. These results contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the molecular mechanisms of H. meleagridis pathogenicity and attenuation.