PrawnSeq – QCPU sequenced the Giant freshwater Prawn. Pasookhush, P., Hindmarch, C., Sithigorngul, P. et al. Transcriptomic analysis of Macrobrachium rosenbergii (giant fresh water prawn) post-larvae in response to M. rosenbergii nodavirus (MrNV) infection: de novo assembly and functional annotation. BMC Genomics 20, 762 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12864-019-6102-6
In collaboration with the Department of Biology at Queen’s University, Dr Hindmarch worked with Dr Pasookhush in Thailand in order to perform an RNA sequencing project. Dr. Pasookhush’s group wanted to understand the giant fresh water prawn’s (an economically important species) immune response during the post-larval stage when they are susceptible to infection from a debilitating environmental virus. Furthermore, they wanted to provide bio-rationale targets to help contain and restrict disease outbreak. They ran into a major limitation where there is no reference genome for this species. Dr Pasookhush under the supervision of Dr Hindmarch used de novo transcriptome assembly and annotation so that the experimental groups could be compared. This study went from prawn-to-publication in under 1 year.