Tench, Tinca tinca is a freshwater species which receives increasing attention as marine resources are overexploited and alternative feed components must be implemented to enable sustainable development of aquaculture. The aim of the study was to provide scientists and fish farmers with first high quality annotated tench transcriptome and open a new chapter in tench research, especially when practical diets are tested. Therefore, the second aim was to identify differentially expressed contigs (DECs) in tench gut after 86-day trial where adult tench females were fed with 0% and 100% replacement of fish meal (FM) with poultry by-product meal (PBM). De novo assembling using de novo RNA-Seq Assembly Pipeline (DRAP) produced 64070 contigs where these exceeding 1 kbp were mostly annotated. Microsatellite search identified 23668 SSRs and SNPs were distributed in 118002 transitions and 83577 transversions. High quality of the assembly and annotation completeness of the tench transcriptome was confirmed using BUSCO and by mapping contigs against common carp, Cyprinus carpio and zebrafish, Danio rerio data sets. Analysis of gene expression differences between gut samples tench fed with FM and PBM diets revealed 721 and 69 DECs using edgeR and DESeq2, respectively. Venn diagram for these results filtered out 57 DECs which were common for both analysis. Due to a low number of annotated DECs enrichment analysis provided a low number of useful contigs for pathway or functional analysis. Ne