Transcriptom analysis of Mytilus coruscus mantle based on illumina sequencing. Mytilus coruscus

The bivalve shell, primarily consisting of calcium carbonate crystals together with organic matrix, has been investigated as a typical biomineralization model for dozens years. The organic matrix intercalated in a shell is generally assumed to play a role in crystal nucleation, crystal orientation, crystal size regulation, and crystal polymorphism and to contribute to the shell’s biomechanical properties. Recent advances in ease and availability of high throughput RNA-sequencing has resulted in a sharp increase in transcriptome data for invertebrate biominerals. However, for Mytilus, deficiency of transcriptome information limits the insight into biomineralization mechanisms and shell formation. For understanding the molecular diversity of matrix proteins from mussel shell, we report here the application of Illumina sequencing to develop a transcriptome from the adult mantle tissue of Mytilus coruscus. 79,997,776 paired-ends reads amounting to 6 Gb of sequence data were thus generated and was further assembled de novo with Trinity software. A transcriptome was produced after filtering and quality checking yielding a final set of 106,425 high quality foot unigene for analysis.