Transcriptome analysis of hepatopancreas and gills of Palaemon gravieri under salinity stress

Salinity is an important factor in the aquatic environment, and its fluctuations always result in osmotic stress, which affects the survival, distribution, and physiological activities of crustaceans. Crustaceans counter them through osmoregulation, which consists of many mechanisms. Palaemon gravieri is an important economic species in Palaemonidae, widely distributed in the southern East China Sea and the China Yellow Sea, and has a good adaptability to salinity stress. Currently, there are only a few studies on the effects of salinity on P. graviera. Therefore, it is particularly important to study the molecular responses of P. gravieri to salinity fluctuations. In this study, P. gravieri was treated with salinities of 10, 25, and 40, and the hepatopancreas and gills of shrimp in the different salinity groups were sampled after 24 h. The samples were used for RNA extraction and transcriptome analysis. In total, 80,994 unigenes were obtained, of which 19,114 were annotated. The differences in gene expression between different tissues at the same salinity were more significant. Many metabolism-related genes were downregulated in the gills, such as beta-hexosaminidase subunit alpha (HEXA), 10-formyltetrahydrofolate dehydrogenase (ALDH1L1), and Alcohol dehydrogenase class-3 (ADH5). Scanning transmission electron microscope analysis showed that the expression levels of some stress-(but not salinity stress) related genes changed after stress (mostly upregulated), suggesting the existence of secondary stress. Gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA) focused on the expression of transporters in osmoregulation, and the results showed that they mainly played a role in the gills, but ATP-binding cassette (ABC) transporters were more active in the hepatopancreas. This study showed that the response of P. gravieri to salinity change was different not only between the hepatopancreas and gills, but also between low salinity and higher salinity, and the ion transport-related genes were mainly expressed in the gills. Overall, these results improve our understanding of salt tolerance mechanism in P. gravieri.