Department of Entomology and Plant Pathology, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, OK 74078, USA.
Dev Comp Immunol. 2013 Apr;39(4):388-98. doi: 10.1016/j.dci.2012.10.004. Epub 2012 Nov 23.
As a biochemical model, Manduca sexta has substantially contributed to our knowledge on insect innate immunity. The RNA-Seq approach was implemented in three studies to examine tissue immunotranscriptomes of this species. With the latest and largest focusing on highly regulated process- and tissue-specific genes, we further analyzed the same set of data using BLAST2GO to explore functional aspects of the larval fat body (F) and hemocyte (H) transcriptomes with (I) or without (C) immune challenge. Using immunity-related sequences from other insects, we found 383 homologous contigs and compared them with those discovered based on relative abundance changes. The major overlap of the two lists validated our previous research designed for gene discovery and transcript profiling in organisms lacking sequenced genomes. By concatenating the contigs, we established a repertoire of 232 immunity-related genes encoding proteins for pathogen recognition (16%), signal transduction (53%), microbe killing (13%) and others (18%). We examined their transcript levels along with attribute classifications and detected prominent differences in nine of the 30 level 2 gene ontology (GO) categories. The increase in extracellular proteins (155%) was consistent with the highly induced synthesis of defense molecules (e.g., antimicrobial peptides) in fat body after the immune challenge. We identified most members of the putative Toll, IMD, MAPK-JNK-p38 and JAK-STAT pathways and small changes in their mRNA levels. Together, these findings set the stage for on-going analysis of the M. sexta immunogenome.
作为生化模型，烟青虫在我们对昆虫先天免疫的认识方面做出了重要贡献。三个研究采用 RNA-Seq 方法来检测该物种的组织免疫转录组。最新和最大的研究集中在高度调控的过程和组织特异性基因上，我们使用 BLAST2GO 进一步分析了相同的数据集，以探讨幼虫脂肪体 (F) 和血细胞 (H) 转录组在免疫挑战 (I) 或无免疫挑战 (C) 下的功能方面。使用来自其他昆虫的免疫相关序列，我们发现了 383 个同源基因，并将其与基于相对丰度变化发现的基因进行了比较。这两个列表的主要重叠验证了我们之前的研究，这些研究旨在为缺乏测序基因组的生物体进行基因发现和转录谱分析。通过连接这些基因，我们建立了一个由 232 个免疫相关基因组成的文库，这些基因编码用于病原体识别 (16%)、信号转导 (53%)、微生物杀伤 (13%)和其他 (18%)的蛋白质。我们检查了它们的转录水平以及属性分类，并在 30 个二级基因本体 (GO) 类别中的 9 个类别中检测到了明显的差异。细胞外蛋白 (155%)的增加与免疫挑战后脂肪体中防御分子 (如抗菌肽) 的高度诱导合成一致。我们鉴定了假定的 Toll、IMD、MAPK-JNK-p38 和 JAK-STAT 途径的大多数成员及其 mRNA 水平的微小变化。这些发现为正在进行的烟青虫免疫基因组分析奠定了基础。
