SNP discovery from transcriptome of the swimbladder of Takifugu rubripes

Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) have become the marker of choice for genome-wide association studies in many species. High-throughput sequencing of RNA was developed primarily to analyze global gene expression, while it is an efficient way to discover SNPs from the expressed genes. In this study, we conducted transcriptome sequencing of the swimbladder of Takifugu rubripes using Illumina HiSeq2000 platform to identify gene-associated SNPs in the swimbladder. A total of 30,312,181 unique-mapped-reads were obtained from 44,736,850 raw reads. A total of 62,270 putative SNPs were discovered, which were located in 11,306 expressed genes and 2,246 scaffolds. The average minor allele frequency (MAF) of the SNPs was 0.26. GO and KEGG pathway analysis were conducted to analyze the genes containing SNPs. Validation of selected SNPs revealed that 54% of SNPs (26/48) were true SNPs. The results suggest that RNA-Seq is an efficient and cost-effective approach to discover gene-associated SNPs. In this study, a large number of SNPs were identified and these data will be useful resources for population genetic study, evolution analysis, resource assessment, genetic linkage analysis and genome-wide association studies.