Generation of a rainbow trout reference transcriptome for identifying genes responding to stressors of aquaculture environments

Stressors inherent in aquaculture production can induce physiological responses which can have adverse effects on growth, reproduction and immunocompetence. We developed a reference transcriptome to evaluate responses to heat shock, low temperature, high salinity, crowding, and low dissolved oxygen/high carbon dioxide. The reference sequence was obtained by Roche 454 pyrosequencing of a normalized cDNA library and is therefore solely qualitative, containing representative samples from all the different stressors (including controls) and tissues (gill, brain, liver, spleen, kidney and muscle). A total of 3,160,306 high quality reads were generated and 2,708,437 reads were assembled into 110,026 contigs. Comparisons with existing transcriptome data reveal a significant contribution to publicly available transcriptome data for rainbow trout. This resource will be used in future studies for global characterization stress responses at the level of the transcriptome.