title: De Novo Transcriptome Assembly of the Chinese Swamp Buffalo by RNA Sequencing and SSR Marker Discovery.
abstract: The Chinese swamp buffalo (Bubalis bubalis) is vital to the lives of small farmers and has tremendous economic importance. However, a lack of genomic information has hampered research on augmenting marker assisted breeding programs in this species. Thus, a high-throughput transcriptomic sequencing of B. bubalis was conducted to generate transcriptomic sequence dataset for gene discovery and molecular marker development. Illumina paired-end sequencing generated a total of 54,109,173 raw reads. After trimming, de novo assembly was performed, which yielded 86,017 unigenes, with an average length of 972.41 bp, an N50 of 1,505 bp, and an average GC content of 49.92%. A total of 62,337 unigenes were successfully annotated. Among the annotated unigenes, 27,025 (43.35%) and 23,232 (37.27%) unigenes showed significant similarity to known proteins in NCBI non-redundant protein and Swiss-Prot databases (E-value < 1.0E-5), respectively. Of these annotated unigenes, 14,439 and 15,813 unigenes were assigned to the Gene Ontology (GO) categories and EuKaryotic Ortholog Group (KOG) cluster, respectively. In addition, a total of 14,167 unigenes were assigned to 331 Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) pathways. Furthermore, 17,401 simple sequence repeats (SSRs) were identified as potential molecular markers. One hundred and fifteen primer pairs were randomly selected for amplification to detect polymorphisms. The results revealed that 110 primer pairs (95.65%) yielded PCR amplicons and 69 primer pairs (60.00%) presented polymorphisms in 35 individual buffaloes. A phylogenetic analysis showed that the five swamp buffalo populations were clustered together, whereas two river buffalo breeds clustered separately. In the present study, the Illumina RNA-seq technology was utilized to perform transcriptome analysis and SSR marker discovery in the swamp buffalo without using a reference genome. Our findings will enrich the current SSR markers resources and help spearhead molecular genetic research studies on the swamp buffalo.
authors.affiliation: Key Laboratory of Buffalo Genetics, Breeding and Reproduction technology, Ministry of Agriculture, Buffalo Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Nanning, Guangxi, P. R. China.
authors.forename: Tingxian
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Deng
authors.affiliation: Key Laboratory of Buffalo Genetics, Breeding and Reproduction technology, Ministry of Agriculture, Buffalo Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Nanning, Guangxi, P. R. China.
authors.forename: Chunying
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Pang
authors.affiliation: Key Laboratory of Buffalo Genetics, Breeding and Reproduction technology, Ministry of Agriculture, Buffalo Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Nanning, Guangxi, P. R. China.
authors.forename: Xingrong
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Lu
authors.affiliation: Key Laboratory of Buffalo Genetics, Breeding and Reproduction technology, Ministry of Agriculture, Buffalo Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Nanning, Guangxi, P. R. China.
authors.forename: Peng
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Zhu
authors.affiliation: Key Laboratory of Buffalo Genetics, Breeding and Reproduction technology, Ministry of Agriculture, Buffalo Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Nanning, Guangxi, P. R. China.
authors.forename: Anqin
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Duan
authors.affiliation: Key Laboratory of Buffalo Genetics, Breeding and Reproduction technology, Ministry of Agriculture, Buffalo Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Nanning, Guangxi, P. R. China.
authors.forename: Zhengzhun
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Tan
authors.affiliation: Key Laboratory of Buffalo Genetics, Breeding and Reproduction technology, Ministry of Agriculture, Buffalo Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Nanning, Guangxi, P. R. China.
authors.forename: Jian
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Huang
authors.affiliation: Key Laboratory of Buffalo Genetics, Breeding and Reproduction technology, Ministry of Agriculture, Buffalo Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Nanning, Guangxi, P. R. China.
authors.forename: Hui
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Li
authors.affiliation: Key Laboratory of Buffalo Genetics, Breeding and Reproduction technology, Ministry of Agriculture, Buffalo Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Nanning, Guangxi, P. R. China.
authors.forename: Mingtan
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.affiliation: Key Laboratory of Buffalo Genetics, Breeding and Reproduction technology, Ministry of Agriculture, Buffalo Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Nanning, Guangxi, P. R. China.
authors.forename: Xianwei
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Liang
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D002020:Buffaloes / Q000235:genetics*; D019295:Computational Biology / Q000379:methods; D005260:Female; D005819:Genetic Markers; D059014:High-Throughput Nucleotide Sequencing; D008297:Male; D018895:Microsatellite Repeats; D058977:Molecular Sequence Annotation; D059372:Nucleotide Motifs; D011110:Polymorphism, Genetic; D059467:Transcriptome
chemical_list: D005819:Genetic Markers