De novo assembly and transcriptome characterization of major growth-related genes in various tissues of Penaeus monodon

Black tiger shrimp (Penaeus monodon) is an economically important species for aquaculture in Vietnam; however, very little information is available regarding its transcriptome. In this study, we sequenced four transcriptome libraries from mRNA of heart, muscle, hepatopancreas, and eyestalk tissues of P. monodon individuals using the Illumina MiSeq® platform, yielding 78,575,346 raw paired-end reads. After quality control, a total of 62,327,726 paired-end reads were de novo assembled into 69,089 unigenes with an average size of 447.89bp, N50 of 481bp, and transcriptome size of 30.94Mb. Comparisons of the assembled unigenes against five public protein databases identified 165 unigenes related to growth and development, and expression analysis revealed that 14,229 unigenes were differentially expressed among tissues. In addition, we detected 12,768 simple sequence repeats (SSRs) in 11,173 unigenes. This work provides candidate genes for trait mapping, marker-assisted breeding, genetic studies and functional genome annotation of P. monodon.