Starry flounder, Platichthys stellatus is spotlighted as a valuable marine flatfish for aquaculture in Korea with a salinity and disease tolerance. One of the challenges of studying the biological and molecular mechanisms involved in the aquaculture of this species is the limited genomic information available. In this context, transcriptome sequencing is useful for identifying genes that participate in specific biological processes when genomic data is not available This study sought to establish a global transcriptome database from the tissues of the brain, head kidney, and liver of P. stellatus. This study aims to advance our understanding of the molecular aspects involved in energy metabolism in this species.
RNA-sequencing results yielded 5,954,872,200–14,180,685,600 bp of raw data, and 109,062,581–387,774,428 bp of high-quality filtered reads after trimming. After de novo assembly, 107,062–359,922 assembled contigs were obtained. Total transcripts of each tissue were classified to GO, COG, and KEGG pathways. Among the categories of KEGG pathways, three glycolysis/gluconeogenesis, insulin signaling pathway, and FoxO signaling pathway related to the energy metabolism were selected, and compared the transcripts involved in these tissues in each tissue. As a result, the brain had the highest number of transcripts among the three tissues in the categories of the insulin signaling pathway (160, 0.136%) and the FoxO signaling pathway (432, 0.366%). The head kidney had the highest number of transcripts among the three tissues in the glycolysis/gluconeogenesis category (723, 0.613%). However, when comparing the ratios belonging to each category, the liver appeared to have a relatively high ratio in glycolysis (694, 1.084%) and FoxO signaling pathways (299, 0.467%).