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BackgroundThe Malaysian giant freshwater prawn, Macrobrachium rosenbergii, is an economically important crustacean worldwide. However, production of this prawn is facing a serious threat from Vibriosis disease caused by Vibrio species such as Vibrio parahaemolyticus. Unfortunately, the mechanisms involved in the immune response of this species to bacterial infection are not fully understood. We therefore used a high-throughput deep sequencing technology to investigate the transcriptome and comparative expression profiles of the hepatopancreas from this freshwater prawn infected with V. parahaemolyticus to gain an increased understanding of the molecular mechanisms underlying the species’ immune response to this pathogenic bacteria.ResultA total of 59,122,940 raw reads were obtained from the control group, and 58,385,094 reads from the Vibrio-infected group. Via de novo assembly by Trinity assembler, 59,050 control unigenes and 73,946 Vibrio-infected group unigenes were obtained. By clustering unigenes from both libraries, a total of 64,411 standard unigenes were produced. The standard unigenes were annotated against the NCBI non-redundant, Swiss-Prot, Kyoto Encyclopaedia of Genes and Genome pathway (KEGG) and Orthologous Groups of Proteins (COG) databases, with 19,799 (30.73%), 16,832 (26.13%), 14,706 (22.83%) and 7,856 (12.19%) hits respectively, giving a final total of 22,455 significant hits (34.86% of all unigenes). A Gene Ontology (GO) analysis search using the Blast2GO program resulted in 6,007 unigenes (9.32%) being categorized into 55 functional groups. A differential gene expression analysis produced a total of 14,569 unigenes aberrantly expressed, with 11,446 unigenes significantly up-regulated and 3,103 unigenes significantly down-regulated. The differentially expressed immune genes fall under various processes of the animal immune system.ConclusionThis study provided an insight into the antibacterial mechanism in M. rosenbergii and the role of differentially expressed immune genes in response to V. parahaemolyticus infection. Furthermore, this study has generated an abundant list of transcript from M.rosenbergii which will provide a fundamental basis for future genomics research in this field.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13099-015-0052-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Technology had enabled many adult to pursue their education. However, technology changes in terms of type and accessing had caused "digital divide" (DD) to exist among students of all ages. In this paper, issues which should be incorporated in measuring digital divide for adult learners are discussed. The issues which are discussed in this paper are age, gender and income. Why these issues should be included in evaluating DD are examined.

Realizing the importance of education in developing a country, many governments had begun to pay more attention in improving the education quality in their country. However whether the desired level of education quality is equally distributed is still debated on. On top of that, current literature on which level of education, either basic or tertiary education, brings greater return to the society is still inconclusive. It is not the objective of this paper to answer or add on the debate. On the other hand this paper would like to explore the relationship between school quality, namely at primary education and secondary education, and economic growth. Educational inequality at primary and secondary education would be measured with using the concept of education Gini. Using GDP as the dependent variable and regressing it with Gini coefficient of primary education and secondary education, would be able to show which level of education inequality is significant in explaining the economic growth of a country. Using Malaysian data, for the last 20 years, the relationship between education inequality of different level of education and the economic growth would be postulated.