RNA-Seq analysis for heat tolerance associated genes in catfish

In the face of global climate variability, it is of interest to develop catfish strains tolerant to a broader climate conditions such as elevated temperature. In order to identify genes that are associated with thermal stress in channel catfish on a genome scale, we conducted a whole transcriptome profiling using RNA-Seq with a family of 306 hybrid catfish. Samples were collected into three groups: the control group, the intolerant and tolerant group after exposure to a higher temperature. Two tissues, liver and gill, were collected and total RNA was isolated for high throughput sequencing using the Illumina Hiseq 2000. Approximately, over 330 million quality reads were generated, totally 31 billion bases. Analysis of the RNA-Seq short reads identified a set of up-regulated genes and down-regulated genes with a fold-change cut-off of two. qRT-PCR will be used to validated a set of selected genes, and the potential gene pathways involved in the response to heat stress will be identified. This work should set the foundation for studying heat toleranct and eventually select for more tolerant catfish genotypes for aquaculture.