Novel transcriptome resources for three scleractinian coral species from the Indo-Pacific

Transcriptomic resources for coral species can provide insight into coral evolutionary history and stress-response physiology. Goniopora columna, Galaxea astreata, and Galaxea acrhelia are scleractinian corals of the Indo-Pacific, representing a diversity of morphologies and life-history traits. G. columna and G. astreata are common and cosmopolitan, while G. acrhelia is largely restricted to the coral triangle and Great Barrier Reef. Reference transcriptomes for these species were assembled from replicate colony fragments exposed to elevated (31°C) and ambient (27°C) temperatures. Trinity was used to create de novo assemblies for each species from 92–102 million raw Illumina Hiseq 2 × 150 bp reads. Host-specific assemblies contained 65 460–72 405 contigs, representing 26 693–37 894 isogroups (∼genes) with an average N50 of 2254. Gene name and/or gene ontology annotations were possible for 58% of isogroups on average. Transcriptomes contained 93.1–94.3% of EuKaryotic Orthologous Groups comprising the core eukaryotic gene set, and 89.98–91.92% of the single-copy metazoan core gene set orthologs were complete, indicating fairly comprehensive assemblies. This work expands the complement of transcriptomic resources available for scleractinian coral species, including the first reference for a representative of Goniopora spp. as well as species with novel morphology.