Development of molecular resources for the Chinese horseshoe crab Tachypleus tridentatus

The Chinese horseshoe crab Tachypleus tridentatus is an endangered marine benthic species of great biomedical value and scientific significance. In this study, T. tridentatus hemocyte transcriptome was sequenced to rapidly develop molecular resources using the Illumina paired-end sequencing platform. Deep sequencing generated a total of 38 402 764 reads that consisted of 7.7 Gbp raw data, which were assembled into 38 759 unigenes with an average length of 668.6 bp. A total of 608 microsatellite loci and 71959 high-confidence single nucleotide polymorphisms were discovered. All the assembled unigenes were annotated by running BLASTx similarity searches on Nr, Swiss-Prot, COG, and KEGG databases; of which 17 446 (45.0%) unigenes showed significant matches (E-value