Transcriptomic Association Analysis of the Metabolic Mechanism of Sulfamethoxazole in Channel Catfish (

Sulfamethoxazole is a widely used antimicrobial drug used to treat bacterial diseases in aquaculture. To understand the gene expression in channel catfish liver after treatment with sulfamethoxazole, in this study, the treatment group received sulfamethoxazole (100 mg/kg bw), which was administered orally once, and samples were taken at 5 h, 12 h, and 6 d after the administration of sulfamethoxazole, while the control group was orally administered sterile water. To further identify potentially significant genes, a transcriptome analysis using RNA-seq was carried out. More than 50 million high-quality reads were found. After filtering and quality analysis, these reads were identified as 54,169,682, 51,313,865, 51,608,845, and 49,333,491. After counting 23,707 of these transcripts for gene expression, it was discovered that 14,732 of them had genes with differential expression. Moreover, we found that the annotation with the most GO variation was "cellular process" (1616 genes), "metabolic process" (1268 genes), "binding" (1889 genes), and "catalytic activity" (1129 genes). KEGG pathways showed that the "metabolic pathway" was the pathway that was significantly enriched in both experimental groups when comparing the experimental groups: 5 h and 12 h (128 genes); 5 h and 6 d (332 genes); and 12 h and 6 d (348 genes). Also, UDP- glucuronosyltransferase (