Transcriptomic analysis of Andrias davidianus meat and experimental validation for exploring its bioactive components as functional foods

Andrias davidianus (Chinese giant salamander, CGS) is the largest and oldest extant amphibian species in the world and is a source of prospective functional food in China. However, the progress of functional peptides mining was slow due to lack of reference genome and protein sequence data. In this study, we illustrated full-length transcriptome sequencing to interpret the proteome of CGS meat and obtain 10,703 coding DNA sequences. By functional annotation and amino acid composition analysis, we have discovered various genes related to signal transduction, and 16 genes related to longevity. We have also found vast variety of functional peptides through protein coding sequence (CDS) analysis by comparing the data obtained with the functional peptide database. Val-Pro-Ile predicted by the CDS analysis was released from the CGS meat through enzymatic hydrolysis, suggesting that our approach is reliable. This study suggested that transcriptomic analysis can be used as a reference to guide polypeptide mining in CGS meat, thereby providing a powerful mining strategy for the bioresources with unknown genomic and proteomic sequences.