Pacific threadfin (Polydactylus sexfilis), locally known as Moi, is a desirable fish for aquaculture and recreational fishing. To understand the basic mechanism of muscle formation and its impacts on flesh quality, we established a cDNA library using mRNA of the skeletal muscle tissue from fingerlings. The library size was 1.1 × 108 plaque forming units mg−1 and the percentage of recombinant clones was >81%. A pilot sequencing project from 181 clones identified 129 useful expressed sequence tags (ESTs), of which 90 ESTs exhibited significant homology to known genes and 39 ESTs have low homologies to unknown genes by blast algorithm. The most abundant EST from the pilot sequence data is ... More
Pacific threadfin (Polydactylus sexfilis), locally known as Moi, is a desirable fish for aquaculture and recreational fishing. To understand the basic mechanism of muscle formation and its impacts on flesh quality, we established a cDNA library using mRNA of the skeletal muscle tissue from fingerlings. The library size was 1.1 × 108 plaque forming units mg−1 and the percentage of recombinant clones was >81%. A pilot sequencing project from 181 clones identified 129 useful expressed sequence tags (ESTs), of which 90 ESTs exhibited significant homology to known genes and 39 ESTs have low homologies to unknown genes by blast algorithm. The most abundant EST from the pilot sequence data is nikotinamide riboside kinase 2 (59 times), followed by 60S ribosomal protein L24 (12 times) and ribosomal protein L8 (5 times). Fourteen novel genes were retrieved from the sequenced clones and subjected to gene ontology annotation. Four mRNA sequences were identified as significant regulators of transcription, including Not2p, Tsc22 domain family 2, LIM domain binding factor 3 and mesenchyme homeobox 2. These results suggest that the muscle cDNA library is an useful source for identifying EST sequences of Pacific threadfin.
