Coix lacryma-jobi L. is a very important economic crop widely cultivated in Southeast Asia. Drought affects more than four million square kilometers every year, and is a significant factor limiting agricultural productivity. However, relatively little is known about how Coix lacryma-jobi L. responds to drought treatments. To obtain a detailed and comprehensive understanding of the mechanisms regulating the transcriptional responses of Coix lacryma-jobi L. to drought treatment, we employed high throughput short-read sequencing of cDNA prepared from polyadenylated RNA to explore global gene expression after a seven-day drought treatment. We generated a de novo assembled transcriptome comprising 65,480 unique sequences. Differential expression analysis based on RSEM-estimated transcript abundances identified 5,315 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) when comparing samples from plants following drought-treatment and from the appropriate controls. Among these, the transcripts for 3,460 genes were increased in abundance, whereas 1,855 were decreased. Real-time quantitative PCR for 5 transcripts confirmed the changes identified by RNA-Seq. The results provide a transcriptional overview of the changes in Coix lacryma-jobi L. in response to drought, and will be very useful for studying the function of associated genes and selection of molecular marker of Coix lacryma-jobi L in the future.

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The three-spot swimming crab (Portunus sanguinolentus) is one of most important large size economic crab in China. In this study, we first isolated and characterized a set of 84 SNP loci in P. sanguinolentus. 10 pairs of primers PCR products were sequenced and a total of 3181bp high-quality DNA sequences were obtained from which 84 polymorphic SNP loci were identifed and 84 SNP loci were identified and accurated genotyped. The average frequency of SNP loci was one locus every 38 base pairs in P. sanguinolentus genome. Of these 84 SNP loci, each had bi-alleles with the minor allele frequency ranging from 0.0167 to 0.5000. The observed heterozygosity varied from 0.0333 to 0.7143, while the expected heterozygosity ranged from 0.0333 to 0.5085 per locus. 51 loci showed low variation (HO ≤ 0.3) and fourteen SNP loci showed high variation (HO ≥ 0.5). Among 84 SNP loci, 11 loci showed significant deviation from Hardy–Weinberg Equilibrium. The SNP markers developed herein will provide valuable information for elucidating population genetic diversity, population dynamics, and conservation genetics of this germplasm resource and other related crab species.