Comparative Transcriptome Analysis for the Discovery of Different Expression Genes in Female and Male of Chinese Soft-Shelled Turtle, Pelodiscus sinensis

The Chinese soft shelled turtle (Pelodiscus sinensis) are high economic, evolutionary and conservation value. In present study, paired-end (PE) Illumina sequencing technology was used to comprehensive transcriptome analysis for the female and male turtles. A total of 24,765,075 and 26,707,540 PE reads were obtained after quality filtering in female and male turtles, respectively. These sequences were assembled into 25, 380 unigenes and a mean length of 899 bp. Patterns of enrichment based on gene annotations from the GO and KEGG databases indicated that various structural and functional protein families were uniquely employed between female and male turtles during primordial growth, cellular metabolism is highly up-regulated. 2, 445 genes showed significantly different expressed which distributed in 193 KEGG signaling pathway. In addition, a total number of 7, 378 SSRs were identified as potential molecular markers in our unigenes, and 17 polymorphic loci have been characterized. This study provides new sequence information about P. sinensis, which will provide a basis for the further study of growth. Furthermore, the large sequence resources are expected to be valuable for the development of molecular markers which could greatly benefit its breeding program and whole genome association studies.