The oriental river prawn, Macrobrachium nipponense, is an important aquaculture species in China. Sexual precocity is a serious problem because of genetic retrogression, which has negative effects on product quality and dramatically affects price. Culture of all-male populations of this species would be economically advantageous, as the males grow faster and reach a much larger size than females. Developing such a culture scheme will require discovery of sex- or reproduction-related genes that affect sexual maturity and sex determination. In this study, a high-quality normalized testis cDNA library was constructed to identify novel transcripts. Of the 5280 successful sequencing reaction yields, 5202 expressed tagged sequences (ESTs) with an average length of 954 bp. Ultimately, 3677 unique sequences, including 891 contigs and 2786 singletons, were identified based on cluster and assembly analyses. Sixteen hundred (43.5%) genes were novel based on the NCBI protein database, thus these unidentified genes may improve basic molecular knowledge about M. nipponense. Of the novel unigenes, 34.4% (715/2077) were homologous to insects, such as Tribolium castaneum, Drosophila spp. and Apis mellifera. Fifty-two genes were identified as sex- or reproduction-related based on Gene Ontology classification and sequence comparison with data from other publications. These genes can be classified into groups based on different functions, including 10 sex-determination related genes, 8 male-reproductive genes, 5 cathepsin-related genes, 20 ubiquitin-related genes, 5 ferritin-related genes, and 4 LRR genes. The results of this study provide new sequence information about M. nipponense, which will be the basis for further genetic studies of this species and other decapods crustaceans.
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