Development of molecular resources for the spinyhead croaker (Collichthys lucidus) using illumina sequencing

Collichthys lucidus is an economically important small-sized species; however, it has not been studied extensively at the genomic level. In the present study, we performed de novo transcriptome sequencing of a muscle cDNA library from C. lucidus. A total of 17,313,690 clean reads representing 2,496,838,699 (2.33 Gb) nucleotides were obtained. These clean reads were assembled into 63,440 transcripts, yielding a total of 57,974 unigenes. Of these, 57.38% (33,263), 40.93% (23,728), 54.25% (31,452), 13.84% (8025), 44.80% (25,970), and 21.29% (12,345) produced significant hits in the NR, Swiss-Prot, TrEMBL, CDD, PFAM, and COG databases respectively (E-value < 1 × 10− 5), and 77.49% of the unigenes (44,924) contained open reading frames. Functional analysis demonstrated that 27,708 unigenes were clustered into 69 GO terms, and 17,132 unigenes were mapped to 326 KEGG pathways. A total of 6655 simple sequence repeats were identified. These sequence data provide a useful new molecular resource for future gene expression and functional studies.