To enrich the genomic information of the commercially important fish species, we obtained 5,063 high-quality expressed sequence tags （ESTs） from the muscle cDNA database of the mandarin fish （Siniperca chuatsi）. Clustering analysis yielded 1,625 unique sequences including 443 contigs （from 3,881 EST sequences） and 1,182 sin- gletons. BLASTX searches showed that 959 unique sequences shared homology to proteins in the NCBI non-redundant database. A total of 740 unique sequences were functionally annotated using Gene Ontology. The 1,625 unique sequences were assigned to Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes reference pathways, and the results indicated that transcripts participating in nucleotide metabolism and amino acid metabolism are relatively abundant in S. chuatsi. Meanwhile, we identified 15 genes to be abundantly expressed in muscle of the mandarin fish. These genes are involved in muscle structural formation and regulation of muscle differentiation and development. The most remarkable gene in S. chuatsi is nuclease diphosphate kinase B, which is represented by 449 EST sequences accounting for 8.86% of the total EST sequences. Our work provides a transcript profile expressed in the white muscle of the mandarin fish, laying down a foundation in better understanding of fish genomics.
