Dietary cholesterol-induced transcriptome differences in the intestine, hepatopancreas, and muscle of Oriental River prawn Macrobrachium nipponense

Cholesterol is an important nutrient for crustaceans. In this study, we performed comparative transcriptome analyses to explore the transcriptome differences in the intestine, hepatopancreas, and muscle of Macrobrachium nipponense fed either a low cholesterol (LC) or high cholesterol (HC) diet (2.8 or 17.1 g cholesterol per kg diet). High-throughput RNA-Seq was conducted, resulting in 7.65, 5.88, and 7.59 G clean bases from the intestine, hepatopancreas, and muscle of the LC group, respectively, and 7.59, 6.73, and 6.70 G clean bases from the same tissues of the HC group. Assembly of clean reads resulted in 230,946 unigenes. The following enriched pathways were identified: xenobiotic and drug metabolism by cytochrome P450; chloroalkane and chloroalkene degradation; metabolic and biosynthetic pathways; fatty acid metabolism and biosynthesis; and immune-related pathways. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to describe how functional unigenes and biosynthetic and metabolic pathways are affected by dietary cholesterol in aquatic crustaceans. Thus, these results contribute to our understanding of the molecular mechanisms underlying the cholesterol requirement of crustaceans.