Pontastacus leptodactylus is a cold-water crayfish species widely distributed throughout eastern Europe and western Asia. In 2021, it was discovered in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region in China. Currently, there are no comprehensive reference genome or transcriptome for this species available. In this study, we utilized the PacBio Revio platform to conduct Iso-Seq third-generation full-length transcriptome sequencing of eight major tissues, including hepatopancreas, muscle, gill, heart, gonad, gastrointestinal tract, eyestalk and antennae gland from both male and female adults. After quality control, clustering, and removal of redundant sequences, a total of 137,800 isoforms were obtained. Functional annotation revealed that 103,325 transcripts were successfully annotated, with significant enrichment in KEGG pathways related to signal transduction, transport and metabolism, and cancer-related processes. Furthermore, our analysis revealed a substantial number of long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) in the transcriptome, with 40,646 lncRNAs predicted. To our knowledge, this work provides the first comprehensive transcriptomic resource for P. leptodactylus, which will support future efforts in germplasm conservation and utilization, as well as provide essential data for the assembly and annotation of a high-quality reference genome.
Chen et al. (Mon,) studied this question.