In-depth comparative transcriptome analysis of intestines of red swamp crayfish, Procambarus clarkii, infected with WSSV

Crayfish has become one of the most important farmed aquatic species in China due to its excellent disease resistance against bacteria and viruses. However, the antiviral mechanism of crayfish is still not very clear. In the present study, many high-quality sequence reads from crayfish intestine were obtained using Illumina-based transcriptome sequencing. For the normal group (GN), 44,600,142 high-quality clean reads were randomly assembled to produce 125,394 contigs. For the WSSV-challenged group (GW), 47,790,746 high-quality clean reads were randomly assembled to produce 148,983 contigs. After GO annotation, 39,482 unigenes were annotated into three ontologies: biological processes, cellular components, and molecular functions. In addition, 15,959 unigenes were mapped to 25 different COG categories. Moreover, 7,000 DEGs were screened out after a comparative analysis between the GN and GW samples, which were mapped into 250 KEGG pathways. Among these pathways, 36 were obviously changed (P-values < 0.05) and 28 pathways were extremely significantly changed (P-values < 0.01). Finally, five key DEGs involved in the JAK-STAT signaling pathway were chosen for qRT-PCR. The results showed that these five DEGs were obviously up-regulated at 36 h post WSSV infection in crayfish intestine. These results provide new insight into crayfish antiviral immunity mechanisms.