Meeting Abstract
The broadly distributed venomous box jellyfish Alatina is notorious for its painful and debilitating stings during monthly sperm casting aggregations along beaches in Atlantic and Indo-Pacific localities. This study provides a functional annotation of cubozoan transcriptomes sequenced from adult and larval Alatina alata individuals with a focus on the discovery of genes involved in nematogenesis and venom production, vision and the phototransduction pathway, and sexual reproduction. RNASeq with Illumina technology was used to sequence transcripts from tissue samples excised from an ovulating female A. alata medusa. A pooled transcriptome was assembled de novo (Trinity), and downstream analyses included transcript expression profiling (edgeR) and gene annotation (Trinotate) with a focus on differential expression of candidate genes implicated in venom, vision and sex determined from core gene sets and those reported in the literature. The high quality of these data and the depth of the affiliated gene discovery have the potential to contribute to our understanding of the molecular cues involved in complex sexual behavior of A. alata. These curated transcripts will complement further cnidarian genomics studies, and may help uncover the molecular underpinnings involved in early defense and sensory systems.
