Resources for “De novo transcriptome assembly for Tracheliastes polycolpus, an invasive ectoparasite of freshwater fish in western Europe”

Parasitic copepods are long-standing biological models for the study of mechanisms underlying host-parasite interaction. However, there are still only a few -omic resources available for these organisms and notably when it comes to freshwater parasitic copepods. We sequenced and assembled the transcriptome for <i>Tracheliastes polycolpus, </i>an ectoparasitic copepods of quite a range of cyprinids species in western Europe, from whole body of fifteen adult female parasites sampled on three different host species. These data were made available mainly i) to increase the amount of –omics resources related to freshwater and parasitic copepods and ii) to provide a high quality resource for the study of molecular mechanisms underlying parasitic specificity. Our <i>de novo </i>assembly and quality control procedure allowed us reconstructing 17 187 protein-coding and non-redundant transcripts and providing functional annotations for 13 121 of them. Furthermore this assembly was curated to reach both high Representativeness (i.e. is representative of raw reads used to do the assembly) and Completeness (i.e. contains 90.6 % of the conserved genes across metazoan). Finally, 10 185 transcripts were identified as novel after comparison with a related species (i.e. <i>Lepeophtheirus salmonis</i>). This high quality assembly then constitutes not only the most complete genomic resources for <i>Tracheliastes polycolpus </i>so far, but also a resource of interest to study fundamental issues in host-parasite interactions such as the molecular bases of parasite specificity.<br>