Transcriptome Profiling of Testis during Sexual Maturation Stages in Eriocheir sinensis Using Illumina Sequencing

The testis is a highly specialized tissue that plays dual roles in ensuring fertility by producing spermatozoa and hormones. Spermatogenesis is a complex process, resulting in the production of mature sperm from primordial germ cells. Significant structural and biochemical changes take place in the seminiferous epithelium of the adult testis during spermatogenesis. The gene expression pattern of testis in Chinese mitten crab (Eriocheir sinensis) has not been extensively studied, and limited genetic research has been performed on this species. The advent of high-throughput sequencing technologies enables the generation of genomic resources within a short period of time and at minimal cost. In the present study, we performed de novo transcriptome sequencing to produce a comprehensive transcript dataset for testis of E. sinensis. In two runs, we produced 25,698,778 sequencing reads corresponding with 2.31 Gb total nucleotides. These reads were assembled into 342,753 contigs or 141,861 scaffold sequences, which identified 96,311 unigenes. Based on similarity searches with known proteins, 39,995 unigenes were annotated based on having a Blast hit in the non-redundant database or ESTscan results with a cut-off E-value above 10−5. This is the first report of a mitten crab transcriptome using high-throughput sequencing technology, and all these testes transcripts can help us understand the molecular mechanisms involved in spermatogenesis and testis maturation

Paternal obesity and programming of offspring health

The physical and nutritional environment experienced by the mother prior to and during conception is imperative to the outcome of pregnancy and offspring health. In addition there is now mounting evidence that paternal exposures and conditions at the time of conception are also an important determinant of pregnancy outcome and offspring health. Specifically, male obesity is now demonstrated to have detrimental impacts on fertility and fetal development during subsequent pregnancy and can exert programming effects on the phenotype of offspring lasting up to two generations. We summarise the evidence of the effect of environmental exposures on seminal plasma and sperm, focusing on the effects of obesity, and what bearing this has for offspring both in humans and animal models. The current knowledge of what might form the molecular basis of the phenomena of paternal programming of offspring health are also reviewed with consideration given to signals from both seminal plasma and sperm.Tod Fullston, Helana S. Shehadeh, John E. Schjenken, Nicole O. McPherson, Sarah A. Robertson, Deirdre Zander-Fox, and Michelle Lan