The Chinese giant salamander, Andrias davidianus, is an important species in the course of evolution; however, there is insufficient genomic data in public databases for understanding its immunologic mechanisms. High-throughput transcriptome sequencing is necessary to generate an enormous number of transcript sequences from A. davidianus for gene discovery. In this study, we generated more than 40 million reads from samples of spleen and skin tissue using the Illumina paired-end sequencing technology. De novo assembly yielded 87,297 transcripts with a mean length of 734 base pairs (bp). Based on the sequence similarities, searching with known proteins, 38,916 genes were identified. Gene enrichment analysis determined that 981 transcripts were assigned to the immune system. Tissue-specific expression analysis indicated that 443 of transcripts were specifically expressed in the spleen and skin. Among these transcripts, 147 transcripts were found to be involved in immune responses and inflammatory reactions, such as fucolectin, β-defensins and lymphotoxin beta. Eight tissue-specific genes were selected for validation using real time reverse transcription quantitative PCR (qRT-PCR). The results showed that these genes were significantly more expressed in spleen and skin than in other tissues, suggesting that these genes have vital roles in the immune response. This work provides a comprehensive genomic sequence resource for A. davidianus and lays the foundation for future research on the immunologic and disease resistance mechanisms of A. davidianus and other amphibians.

Lignites are inferior fuel for direct combustion because of high moisture and low calorific value. 1,2 However, they are rich in value-added chemicals with special condensed aromatic structures, which are difficult to be synthesized. Therefore, investigating the organic species in lignites is particularly important. Separable and non-destructive analysis 3 is an effective method to study the molecular composition of organic species in coals. Many group components 4−12 and pure compounds 3,13−16 were isolated and identified by the method. Although direct isolation of pure compounds from coals under mild conditions is a hard and challenging task, we tried to isolate value-added chemicals using a separable and nondestructive method from Shengli lignite (SL). In this communication, effective isolation methods, identification, and possible formation pathways of 3-ethyl-8-methyl-2,3dihydro-1H-cyclopenta[a]chrysene (9, A-, B-, C-, and D-ring tetraaromatic 30-norhopane) are studied.

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