STRIPED BASS
An ovarian transcriptome for all maturational stages of a highly advanced perciform fish, the striped bass, Morone saxatilis
The striped bass (Morone saxatilis), one of the parent species of the farmed hybrid striped bass, is ecologically important and valuable in commercial and recreational fisheries in North America. As it is also slow maturing, highly fecund and long lived, it represents a ''model'' organism for many aquatic species. Female reproductive dysfunction resulting in non-viable eggs, embryos, and larvae inhibits breeding of the striped bass and its hybrids for farming and restocking fisheries. The causes of poor gamete quality are largely unknown, making appropriate and timely corrective measures difficult to achieve.  Understanding such processes are important to aquaculture and may well provide insights into such processes as recruitment variability and variation in year class strength in natural populations. To open avenues of research on expression of genes related to egg quality, we generated a collection of expressed sequence tags (ESTs) from a cDNA library that is representative of the ovarian transcriptome of striped bass. Ovarian tissues at all stages of oogenesis and ovarian atresia, including ovulated eggs, were obtained and pooled and used as the source of purified poly-adenylated mRNA subjected to 454 GS FLX pyrosequencing.