De novo transcriptome assembly of the digitate morphotype of Briareum asbestinum (Octocorallia: Alcyonacea) from the southwest shelf of Puerto Rico.

Octocorals have now become the most visually dominant metazoan benthic taxa of most Caribbean reefs, following the precipitous decline of scleractinian corals. Yet taxonomic issues because of their extensive phenotypic plasticity are still abound. Briareum asbestinum one of the iconic octocorals of the shallow Caribbean coral reefs exhibits a biform morphology, the digitate and the encrusting one. The taxonomic status of each form has not been clarified, yet. Until recently, there were few genetic resources for non-model metazoans, however, affordable high-throughput DNA sequencing has removed this hindrance. We present the first transcriptome of the digitate form of Briareum asbestinum from southwest Puerto Rico. We used paired-end sequencing (Illumina NextSeq 500), with a total yield of 159,754,702 raw reads. De novo assembly was performed utilizing a multi-assembler approach generating 371,554 biologically true, non-redundant transcripts. Open reading frame analysis identified 102,839 putative ORFs of which 78,607 were with annotations. BUSCO analysis indicated a total of 96.4% complete orthologous genes from the metazoan dataset. The assembly presented here serves as an important new genomic reference for the Briareum genus that will facilitate future population and phylogenetic studies aiming to better understand the molecular basis of phenotypic plasticity exhibited throughout the genus.