The zebra mussel, Dreissena polymorpha, continues to spread from its native range in Eurasia to Europe and North America, causing billions of dollars in damage and dramatically altering invaded aquatic ecosystems. Despite these impacts, there are few genomic resources for Dreissena or related bivalves. Although the D.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe European freshwater mollusk Dreissena bugensis (quagga mussel), an invasive species to North America, adheres to surfaces underwater via the byssus: a non-living protein 'anchor'. In spite of its importance as a biofouling species, the sequence of the majority of byssal proteins responsible for adhesion are not known, and little genomic data is available. To determine protein sequence information, we utilized next-generation RNA sequencing and de novo assembly to construct a cDNA library of the quagga mussel foot transcriptome, which contains over 200,000 transcripts.
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