Here’s a lobster fact for you: last year the American lobster was worth $456M to Maine lobstermen alone. You may also be surprised to learn this animal is also a popular model for experiments on nervous system activity, with a new article published every 18 hours. This calculation grows rapidly if you include articles on other subjects of interest: population dynamics, life cycle and development, etc. That’s quite a lot of attention for an animal most people just think of as dinner! However, despite its staggering commercial value and scientific importance, we really know very little about the genetics of the lobster.

For a portion of her graduate work, recent PhD recipient Lara Lewis McGrath set to rectify this by sequencing and annotating the transcriptome of the lobster. The transcriptome isn’t a full record of the lobster’s DNA (that’s a genome), but it is a full set of the genes the lobster expresses. Recently published in the journal BMC Genomics, the study, which co-authors Professor Steven Vollmer, Professor Joseph Ayers, and graduate student Stefan Kaluziak, describes the first published transcriptome for the lobster and how this transcriptome changes across different neural and muscle tissues.

The results indicate that 15-25% of all genes change significantly in expression across different tissue types, and the study describes which of these genes might be important for making each tissue behave the way it does. For example, increased expression of genes are involved in temperature sensing in the nervous system of the heart.

This study advances knowledge of the commercially and scientifically important American lobster, contributing to a body of work that advances neurobiological applications of and ecological and behavioral research on this model organism.