De novo assembly and characterization of tissue specific transcriptomes in the emerald notothen, Trematomus bernacchii

BACKGROUND: The notothenioids comprise a diverse group of fishes that rapidly radiated after isolation by the Antarctic Circumpolar Current approximately 14–25 million years ago. Given that evolutionary adaptation has led to finely tuned traits with narrow physiological limits in these organisms, this system provides a unique opportunity to examine physiological trade-offs and limits of adaptive responses to environmental perturbation. As such, notothenioids have a rich history with respect to studies attempting to understand the vulnerability of polar ecosystems to the negative impacts associated with global climate change. Unfortunately, despite being a model system for understanding physiological adaptations to extreme environments, we still lack fundamental molecular tools for much of the Nototheniidae family. RESULTS: Specimens of the emerald notothen, Trematomus bernacchii, were acclimated for 28 days in flow-through seawater tanks maintained near ambient seawater temperatures (−1.5°C) or at +4°C. Following acclimation, tissue specific cDNA libraries for liver, gill and brain were created by pooling RNA from n = 5 individuals per temperature treatment. The tissue specific libraries were bar-coded and used for 454 pyrosequencing, which yielded over 700 thousand sequencing reads. A de novo assembly and annotation of these reads produced a functional transcriptome library of T. bernacchii containing 30,107 unigenes, 13,003 of which possessed significant homology to a known protein product. Digital gene expression analysis of these extremely cold adapted fish reinforced the loss of an inducible heat shock response and allowed the preliminary exploration into other elements of the cellular stress response. CONCLUSIONS: Preliminary exploration of the transcriptome of T. bernacchii under elevated temperatures enabled a semi-quantitative comparison to prior studies aimed at characterizing the thermal response of this endemic fish whose size, abundance and distribution has established it as a pivotal species in polar research spanning several decades. The comparison of these findings to previous studies demonstrates the efficacy of transcriptomics and digital gene expression analysis as tools in future studies of polar organisms and has greatly increased the available genomic resources for the suborder Notothenioidei, particularly in the Trematominae subfamily.