3.3.2 Immediate versus delayed postmortem tissue harvesting
We found no significant difference in gene expression between samples for which tissues were harvested immediately vs. samples for which tissue was harvested ~5 minutes after death. For 3’ Tag-Seq, when all tissues were analyzed together only one out 38,864 genes (<<1%) was recovered to be significantly different with an adjusted p -value < 0.05. Similarly to what was observed for the comparison between the two sampling techniques, when tissues were analyzed separately, blood showed no significantly differentially expressed genes out of the 27,401 recovered, while we found <<1% differentially expressed genes for gills and muscle (18 out of 15,310 for gills and 3 out of 34,460, respectively, with adjusted p -value < 0.05) (Supporting Information Table S3). For whole mRNA-Seq (NEB), only 6 genes out of 23265 (<<1%) were expressed significantly differently (adjusted p -value < 0.05, Supporting Information Table S3).