A comparative transcriptomic study on the evolution of nuclear and mitochondrial genes in bivalves

With more than 100.000 extant species, Mollusca is the second Phylum for number of species after arthropods. Molluscs are abundant in most marine and terrestrial environments and some species have adapted to live in extreme conditions. Also, this taxon shows a great diversity in term of morphology, size, complexity and behavioral repertories. All these features make mollusc species excellent candidates for studying evolution. Nevertheless, few comparative genomic or transcriptomic works are present in literature and most of the biological questions investigated so far remain unexplored in this Phylum. In addition, most of the bioinformatics tools required to analyze High Throughput Sequencing (HTS) data are optimized for model species, making the investigation of nonmodel organisms far to be straightforward. During my PhD, my research activity was twofold: I first developed a pipeline specifically designed for the annotation of transcriptomes in non-model animals; then I used RNA-Seq data to investigate transcriptomes from mature gonads of R. decussatus and R. philippinarum (Bivalvia, Veneridae), focusing my analyses on the evolution of sex-biased genes and on the co-evolution of mitochondrial and nuclear genomes.