Identification of functional genes in deep-sea corals from seamounts in West Pacific by de novo RNA sequencing

Abstract

This is a study about investigation the biodiversity of the deep-sea seamount in the West Pacific and discovering the marine biological genetic resources. Coral samples were obtained using epibenthic sledge(EBS) which was one of the collection equipment of Onnuri Research Vessel in Korea Institute of Ocean Science and Technology. To classify the coral species, DNA sequences of CO1 and MSH1 were used together with morphological classification method. RNA was extracted by following the method optimized for the soft coral and de novo RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) was carried out to explore the functional genes in three deep-sea coral species, Iridogoria splendens, Chrysogoria chryseis and Calyptrophora wyvillei. Approximately 193,579 unigenes from Iridogoria splendens, 235,513 unigenes from Chrysogoria chryseis and 193,796 unigenes from Calyptrophora wyvillei were identified and those unigenes were classified their functions using NCBI Nucleotide, Pfam, Gene ontology (GO), EggNOG, and UniProt databases. This study focused on the identification of functional genes in deep sea corals and this genetic information will be used for the various analyses of secure genetic sources of target species and understand their environmental characteristics.