Análise exploratória do Transcriptoma do Arapaima gigas

Abstract

Arapaima gigas, known as pirarucu, is considered one of the largest freshwater fish in the world, with a notable interest in the aquaculture due to its particular biological characteristics, including its rapid growth in its early years. In recent years, despite the massive availability of data from sequencing projects, few have addressed the taxon that includes this species. The present study was developed aiming characterize the transcriptome of this species, through an exploratory transcriptional analysis and patterns of gene expression related to specific gene profiles, in addition to highlighting sex-specific genes. By cDNA sequencing of 12 different tissue samples from Arapaima gigas, a reference transcriptome was assembled with a genome-guided assembly strategy. The gene expression profiles of different male and female tissues of adult specimens were analyzed. Pipelines such as Hisat2, Braker2, Trinity, Diamond and mygene were used for the assembly and annotation of genes, as well as clusterProfiler and KEGG tools for functional enrichment analysis and animalTFDB for identifying transcription factors. In this study we highlighted a set of annotated genes which may be potential candidates to biotechnological products, as they are involved in individual tissue phenotypes, sexual dimorphism processes, and in regulation of process that can explain their unique morphological characteristics. This study can also substantially conduct further analysis.