De novo transcriptome assembly of the Mediterranean sea-rock pool mosquitoes Aedes mariae and Aedes zammitii

Abstract

Understanding the genomic consequences of hybridization is an essential research focus in global change biology. Species adapted to rapidly changing environments can offer valuable, yet largely underexplored insights in this context. Here, we present the first de novo transcriptomes of the sea-rock pools mosquitoes Aedes mariae and Aedes zammitii, two species adapted to highly variable habitats. Using RNA-seq data obtained from larval stages, we assembled and annotated 95,059,578 reads for Ae. mariae and 101,050,236 reads for Ae. zammitii, detecting 49,352 transcripts with N50 of 2,615 for the former and 43,461 transcripts with N50 of 2,570 for the latter. Validation by BUSCO confirmed the high quality of our resources. Homology alignments of predicted ORFs showed that 21,842 sequences from Ae. mariae and 21,944 sequences from Ae. zammitii mapped to the Nr, SwissProt, and TrEMBL databases, while 19,208 and 19,393 predicted ORFs, respectively, were functionally annotated using the COG and KEGG databases. These high-quality transcriptomes will provide valuable resources to investigate the role of hybridization in species adaptation to changing environments.