RNA-Seq analysis of immune-relevant genes in Lateolabrax japonicus during Vibrio anguillarum infection.

Lateolabrax japonicus is one of the main marine aquatic fish species, and is popularly cultured in East Asia due to its highly commercial value. In recent years, because of large-scale and intensive farming and seawater pollution, fish diseases keep breaking out. However, systematic study on L. japonicus immunogenetics is limited due to the deficiency of deep sequencing technologies and genome backgrounds. In this study, the widely analysis at the transcriptome level for L. japonicus that infected with Vibrio anguillarum was performed. In total, 334,388,688 high quality reads were obtained in six libraries (HK-VA, HK-PBS, LI-VA, LI-PBS, SP-VA and SP-PBS) and de novo assembled into 101,860 Unigenes with an average unigene length of 879 bp. Based on sequence similarity 30,142 unigenes (29.59%) were annotated in the public databases. Comparative analysis revealed, 1,202, 3034 and 3519 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were identified in three comparisons (HK-PBS VS HK-VA, LI-PBS VS LI-VA and SP-PBS VS SP-VA). Enrichment and pathway analysis of the DEGs was also carried out to excavate the candidate genes related to immunity. In conclusion, this study identifies and evaluates dozen of potential immune related pathways and candidate genes, which are indispensable for padding genomic resources of L. japonicus, and would lay the foundation for further studying and illuminating the mechanism of host-pathogen interactions.