Transcriptome of the freshwater amphipod Gammarus pulex hepatopancreas

So far, ecotoxicological studies used biomarkers of exposure or of effects in order to investigate the impacts of contaminated areas on biota (Peakall, 1994 [6]). However, although these results are important in the ecotoxicological risk assessment, biomarkers are very specific and only provide information on the biological processes or physiological pathways targeted by the biomarkers experimenters choose to test (Monsinjon and Knigge, 2007 [5]). In recent years, proteomics have become a major tool in ecotoxicology, as they provide a global insight into the mechanism of action of pollutants without the need of hypothesis testing or any preconception on the biological processes likely impacted (Gismondi et al., 2015; Trapp et al., 2015 [7]; Truebano, 2016 [8]). However, the analysis of proteomic results is often limited due to the lack of database, especially for non-model organisms, such as Gammarus sp, commonly used as biological model in ecotoxicology (Sornom et al., 2012 [11]; Vellinger et al., 2013 [9]; Gismondi and Thomé, 2014 [1]; Lebrun et al., 2014 [3]). Here, we performed Illumina HiSeq sequencing to total RNA isolated from the hepatopancreas (i.e. detoxification tissue) of Gammarus pulex males and females coming from uncontaminated river and contaminated river (e.g. PCB, benzo(a)pyrene). Approximately 290 M paired-end reads were assembled, filtered and sorted into 39,801 contigs whose 10.878 were similar of proteins available in databases. The assembled contigs could represent a reference hepatopancreas transcriptome for G. pulex, and constitute an important resource for future investigations on the impacts of pollutants on invertebrate biota, since it would improve the understanding of the mechanisms of action involved in toxicity. In addition, the hepatopancreas transcriptome will also allow the identification of new potential biomarkers for the ecotoxicological risk assessments. Assembled contigs were deposited in the European Nucleotide Archive under the BioProject number PRJEB13055, with accession numbers FJVI01000001-FJVI01039801.