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Background: Japanese scallop has been cultured on a large-scale in China for many years. However, serious marine pollution in recent years has resulted in considerable loss to this industry. Moreover, due to the lack of genomic resources, limited research has been carried out on this species. To facilitate the understanding at molecular level immune and stress response mechanism, an extensive transcriptomic profiling and digital gene expression (DGE) database of Japanese scallop upon cadmium exposure was carried out using the Illumina sequencing platform. Results: RNA-seq produced about 112 million sequencing reads from the tissues of adult Japanese scallops. These reads were assembled into 194,839 non-redundant sequences with open reading frame (ORF), of which 14,240 putative amino acid sequences were assigned biological function annotation and were annotated with gene ontology and eukaryotic orthologous group terms. In addition, we identified 720 genes involved in response to stimulus and 302 genes involved in immune-response pathways. Furthermore, we investigated the transcriptomic changes in the gill and digestive gland of Japanese scallops following cadmium exposure using a tag-based DGE system. A total of 7,556 and 3,002 differentially expressed genes were detected, respectively, and functionally annotated with KEGG pathway annotations. Conclusion: This study provides a comprehensive transcripts sequence resource for the Japanese scallop and presents a survey of gene expression in response to heavy metal exposure in a non-model marine invertebrate via the Illumina sequencing platform. These results may contribute to the in-depth elucidation of the molecular mechanisms involved in bivalve responses to marine pollutants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]