AbstractsBiology & Animal Science

De Novo Transcriptome Assembly for the Oympia Oyster (Ostrea lurida), A Species of Conservational Concern

by Ashley Maynard




Institution: California State University – East Bay
Department:
Year: 2016
Keywords: American oyster
Posted: 02/05/2017
Record ID: 2126037
Full text PDF: http://hdl.handle.net/10211.3/172139


Abstract

The Olympia oyster, Ostrea lurida, is the only oyster native to the west coast of N. America. Once abundant, O. lurida is now considered functionally extinct and absence of Olympia oysters has contributed to a continual decline in the health of California???s valuable estuary ecosystems. Human-assisted reintroduction is one potential strategy to increase O. lurida population sizes and help restore Californian estuaries. Ideally, restoration would use genotypes capable of surviving future conditions. However, which O. lurida populations will be most tolerant of climate change, in particular low salinity, and therefore most suitable for use in reintroduction remains uncertain. RNA-Seq has emerged as a vital tool to understand ecological and evolutionary processes of non-model organisms. Using a novel RNA-Seq pipeline, a transcriptome for O. lurida was generated yielding 51,574 contigs and accounting for upwards of 10,000 unique genes. Quality control metrics including mean contig length (1664 bp), percent of reads mapped back to the reference transcriptome (78%), and the percent of annotated reads (49%), are similar to other non-model organism transcriptome assemblies, and offers a substantial improvement over existing sequence resources for O. lurida. In important future research, this transcriptome can be used to better understand how O. lurida populations manage environmental stress at the molecular level and help to identify which populations of O. lurida are ultimately best suited for reintroduction. Advisors/Committee Members: Baysdorfer, Dr. Christoph W. (advisor), Evans, Dr. Tyler G. (primaryAdvisor).