Full-length transcriptome analysis of a bloom-forming dinoflagellate Scrippsiella acuminata (Dinophyceae)

The dinoflagellate Scrippsiella acuminata (formerly Scrippsiella trochoidea) is a cosmopolitan species commonly forms dense blooms worldwide. It also has been adopted as representative species for life history studies on dinoflagellates. The peculiar genetic features of its large nuclear genome make the whole-genome sequencing highly challenging. Herein, we employed single-molecule real-time (SMRT) sequencing technology to acquire the full-length transcriptome of S. acuminata at different life stages (vegetative cells at different growth stages and resting cysts). A total of 51.44 Gb clean SMRT sequencing reads were generated, which finally yielded 226,117 non-redundant full-length non-chimeric (FLNC) reads. Among them, 78,393 long non-coding RNA (lncRNA), 550 putative transcription factors (TF) members from 19 TF families, 67,212 simple sequence repeats (SSRs), and 116,417 protein coding sequences (CDSs) were identified. This is the first report on full-length transcriptome of Thoracosphaeraceae in Dinophyceae, which is valuable for future genome annotation in this order. Our dataset provides a reference transcriptomic background for life history studies on dinoflagellates and will contribute to understanding molecular mechanisms underlying S. acuminata blooms.