Comparative transcriptome analysis of three color variants of the sea cucumber Apostichopus japonicus.. Comparative transcriptome analysis of Apostichopus japonicus

The sea cucumber Apostichopus japonicus Selenka 1867 represents an important resource in biomedical research, traditional medicine, and the seafood industry. Much of the commercial value of A. japonicus is determined by dorsal/ventral color variation (red, green, and black), yet the taxonomic relationships between these color variants are not clearly understood. We performed the first comparative analysis of de novo assembled transcriptome data from three color variants of A. japonicus. Using the Illumina platform, we sequenced nearly 177,596,774 clean reads representing a total of 18.2 Gbp of sea cucumber transcriptome. A comparison of over 0.3 million transcript scaffolds against the Uniprot/Swiss-Prot database yielded 8,513, 8,602, and 8,588 positive matches for green, red, and black body color transcriptomes, respectively. This work will assist in the discovery and annotation of novel genes that play significant morphological and physiological roles in color variants of A. japonicus, and these sequence data will provide a useful set of resources for the rapidly growing sea cucumber aquaculture industry.