Background The box jellyfish, proteins that elicit toxic effects in envenoming. transcriptome which, coupled with venom proteomics data, enhances our current understanding of box jellyfish venom composition and the molecular structure and function of cnidarian toxins. The generated data represent Tyrphostin a useful resource to guide future comparative studies, novel protein/peptide discovery and the development of more effective treatments for jellyfish stings in humans. (Length: 300). Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12864-015-1568-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. is the largest and most venomous box jellyfish species. It inhabits the tropical coastal waters of Australia and is renowned for its ability to inflict extremely painful and potentially life threatening stings to Rabbit Polyclonal to CD302 humans. Symptoms of envenoming can include the rapid onset of severe cutaneous pain and inflammation, dermonecrosis, dyspnoea, transient hypertension, hypotension, cardiovascular collapse and cardiac arrest (reviewed in [1]). Due to its clinical importance, has remained one of the most intensively researched box jellyfish species. Over five decades of research on whole or fractionated tentacle extracts and nematocyst-derived venom has established that toxins elicit a diverse range of bioactivities including nociception, cytotoxicity in cultured myocytes (cardiac, skeletal and easy muscle) and hepatocytes, haemolytic activity and pore formation in mammalian cell membranes, neurotoxicity and myotoxicity in nerve and muscle preparations, and Tyrphostin dermonecrotic, cardiovascular and lethal effects in a variety of experimental animals [1-5]. In recent studies, the potent haemolytic and cardiovascular activities of venom have been attributed primarily to the action of a subset of toxins (CfTXs) that are members of a taxonomically restricted family of cnidarian pore-forming toxins [2,5]. A single proteomics study of venom revealed that several isoforms of the CfTXs are highly abundant in the venom proteome [6], but due to the lack of genomic and transcriptomic data for cubozoans, few other potential toxins were identified [6]. However, the diversity of biological activities associated with venom and the complexity of its venom composition, suggest that other biologically important venom components are yet to be identified. These novel cubozoan venoms could represent a source of potentially useful bioactive compounds for the development of novel therapeutics. Advances in computational techniques for the assembly and annotation of sequence data have enabled the rapid characterization of biologically important protein mixtures from a range of organisms [7,8]. In this work we utilized Illumina sequencing in concert with tandem mass spectroscopy (MS/MS) to conduct a large-scale exploration of the transcriptome and venom proteome of venom, but Tyrphostin also provides the first overview of a box jellyfish transcriptome; thus representing a valuable resource for future comparative genomic, transcriptomic and proteomic studies or novel protein/peptide discovery. Results The transcriptome of C. fleckeri Total RNA, purified from Tyrphostin whole tentacle tissue, was used to generate 43,150,858 paired reads using the Illumina platform. These reads were then assembled, using Oases [9], into 34,438 transcripts that are summarized in Table?1. Approximately 56% (13,052,970) of the raw reads could be mapped back to the final assembly with a mean depth of coverage of 338.47??6069.16 reads per sequence, although a proportion of assembled transcripts exhibited low read support (Determine?1A). Due to the limited number of cubozoan sequences available in protein databases, transcripts were searched against four databases using blastx SwissProt, Cnidaria protein sequences from the GenBank nonredundant protein database and predicted protein sets from the and genome projects. Approximately 40% of the sequences returned a high-scoring (e-value?