AmpuBase: a transcriptome database for eight species of apple snails (Gastropoda: Ampullariidae)

Background Gastropoda, with approximately 80,000 living species, is the largest class of Mollusca. Among gastropods, apple snails (family Ampullariidae) are globally distributed in tropical and subtropical freshwater ecosystems and many species are ecologically and economically important. Ampullariids exhibit various morphological and physiological adaptations to their respective habitats, which make them ideal candidates for studying adaptation, population divergence, speciation, and larger-scale patterns of diversity, including the biogeography of native and invasive populations. The limited availability of genomic data, however, hinders in-depth ecological and evolutionary studies of these non-model organisms.