Reproductive switching analysis of Daphnia similoides between sexual female and parthenogenetic female by transcriptome comparison

Abstract

The water flea Daphnia are planktonic crustaceans commonly found in freshwater environment that can switch their reproduction mode from parthenogenesis to sexual reproduction to adapt to the external environment. As such, Daphnia are great model organisms to study the mechanism of reproductive switching, the underlying mechanism of reproduction and development in cladocerans and other animals. However, little is known about the Daphnia’s reproductive behaviour at a molecular level. We constructed a genetic database of the genes expressed in a sexual female (SF) and a parthenogenetic female (PF) of D. similoides using Illumina HiSeq 2500. A total of 1,763 differentially expressed genes (865 up- and 898 down-regulated) were detected in SF. Of the top 30 up-regulated SF unigenes, the top 4 unigenes belonged to the Chitin_bind_4 family. In contrast, of the top down-regulated SF unigenes, the top 3 unigenes belonged to the Vitellogenin_N family. This is the first study to indicate genes that may have a crucial role in reproductive switching of D. similoides, which could be used as candidate genes for further functional studies. Thus, this study provides a rich resource for investigation and elucidation of reproductive switching in D. similoides.

Transcriptional and Translational Relationship in Environmental Stress: RNAseq and ITRAQ Proteomic Analysis Between Sexually Reproducing and Parthenogenetic Females in Moina micrura

“…In the present study, the expression levels of Vg gene and vitellogenin-2 gene were both significantly higher in SF compared to PF. Similar results were also reported in D. similoides ( Zhang et al, 2016 ). In addition, we also found that Dmagvtg1 was significantly up-regulated in SF at post-transcriptional level.…”

“…Isobaric tags for relative and absolute quantitation (iTRAQ) is the second generation of gel-free proteomic analysis that allows for a more accurate quantitation of proteins than low-throughput proteomic methods, such as traditional two-dimensional gel-based approaches. Recently, transcriptome analysis has been used to determine the DEGs between PF and SF in D. pulex ( Toyota et al, 2015 ) and D. similoides ( Zhang et al, 2016 ), respectively. However, as far as we know, there is no study to conduct proteomic profiling to examine the proteins involved in the reproductive switching under environmental stresses.…”

Transitions to asexuality and evolution of gene expression in Artemia brine shrimp

“…It is generally assumed that the transition between sexual and asexual reproduction represents a major evolutionary change [ 46 ], potentially requiring a major molecular and cellular reorganization. Previous studies have indeed detected hundreds of genes that are differentially expressed between sexual and asexual lineages [ 16 ], or even between sexual and asexual parts of the life cycle of aphids and Daphnia [ 24 , 47 – 49 ]. In the light of this, it is surprising that we find few genes consistently associated with the transition from sexual to asexual reproduction.…”

RNA-seq approach to analysis of gene expression profiles in dark green islands and light green tissues of Cucumber mosaic virus-infected Nicotiana tabacum

“…GO enrichment analysis of the differentially expressed genes (DEGs) was implemented using the GOseq R packages based on the Wallenius non-central hyper-geometric distribution [ 32 , 33 ], which can adjust for gene length bias in DEGs.…”