Abstract
Tetracapsuloides bryosalmonae, a myxozoan endoparasite, causes proliferative kidney disease in salmonids. The life cycle of T. bryosalmonae occurs between invertebrate bryozoan and vertebrate fish hosts. T. bryosalmonae develops in the body cavity of colonial bryozoan and spores are released from mature spore sacs into the water likely through the vestibular pore and infect fish by attaching to their gills. However, very little is known about the transcriptome of this important parasite, which hampers studies into the molecular mechanisms of host-parasite interactions and understanding the parasite biology. In order to circumvent this limitation, we performed de novo transcriptome assembly on the sacs of T. bryosalmonae, collected from infected bryozoan Fredericella sultana. A total of 111.5 million filtered paired-end reads was obtained and assembled into 25,908 contigs corresponding to putative transcripts that were functionally annotated. More than 50% of the assembled transcripts (13,071 contigs) had a significant hit in NCBI non-redundant database. Based on Gene ontology annotation, the most highly scored categories of molecular function of the contigs were related to binding and catalytic activities in T. bryosalmonae. This study provides a global overview of the T. bryosalmonae transcriptome that will be a valuable resource for identifying virulence factors, gene discovery, genome annotation, and vaccine development applications. This data is accessible via NCBI BioProject (PRJNA680464).