De novo assembly and functional annotation of Arion vulgaris trancriptome using RNA-seq

Arion vulgaris, commonly known as Spanish Slug is a slug pest belonging to the family Arionidae. It was ranked among the hundred worst invasive species in Europe that has rapidly spread through many parts of the continent mainly due to lack of biological limiting factors. In this study, we report the transcriptome data that represent the first investigation of gene expression profile in Arion vulgaris on genome-scale level. RNA sequencing and de novo transcriptome assembly of Arion vulgaris transcriptome were performed to provide expression dataset for functional annotation. Approximate number of 339 millions of reads were generated by Ilumina HiSeq 2000 technology that were processed by Trinity pipeline resulting in 136,406 unigenes with average length of 671.04 bp and N50 of 971 bp. Functional annotation using web platform Fastannotator assigned 36,948 genes to the records present in NCBI non-redundant database and 22,868 fo them to Gene Othology terms. Searching against Pfam database identified 21,651 of entries to have at least one domain and 2,336 of genes were assigned with EC numbers. We expect that our study will provide a dataset for further trancriptome and proteome analyses of Arion vulgaris as well as studying the factors underlying its environmental resistance.

西班牙蛞蝓（学名Arion vulgaris，俗称Spanish Slug）是隶属于阿勇蛞蝓科（Arionidae）的有害蛞蝓物种。该物种被列入欧洲百大最严重入侵物种名录，因缺乏生物限制因子，已快速扩散至欧洲大陆多数区域。本研究报道了首个在基因组规模水平上探究西班牙蛞蝓基因表达谱的转录组数据集。我们通过对西班牙蛞蝓进行RNA测序与从头（de novo）转录组组装，构建了可供功能注释使用的表达数据集。实验采用Illumina HiSeq 2000测序技术生成了约3.39亿条测序读段（reads），经Trinity组装流程处理后，共得到136406条单基因（unigenes），平均长度为671.04 bp，N50值为971 bp。使用在线注释平台Fastannotator进行功能注释，将36948个基因比对至NCBI非冗余蛋白序列数据库（NCBI non-redundant database）的记录中，其中22868个基因被注释到基因本体论（Gene Ontology, GO）术语体系。通过比对Pfam蛋白质结构域数据库（Pfam database），鉴定出21651个条目至少包含一个蛋白质结构域；另有2336个基因被赋予酶委员会（Enzyme Commission, EC）编号。本研究有望为西班牙蛞蝓的后续转录组与蛋白质组分析，以及探究其环境抗性背后的分子机制提供可用数据集。