The large-conductance calcium-activated potassium channel (BKCa ) plays an important role in the regulation of insect neural circuits and locomotion, and thus is a potential target of insecticides. In this study, iberiotoxin, an inhibitor of BKCa , was found to prolong the anesthetic time of ethyl acetate on Plutella xylostella larvae. Therefore, the coding sequence of slowpoke gene coding the alpha subunit of BKCa was cloned to investigate the function of this channel in P. xylostella, and the gene expression profile in the developmental stages and tissues was also characterized. The total length of pxslo DNA was more than 19.9 kb, which harbored four alternative splicing sites (ASP-A, ASP-C, ASP-E, and ASP-G), and the coding sequence of pxslo with the highest frequency of splicing (GenBank ID: MN938456) was 3,405 base pair. The characterized PxSlo protein contained conserved domains previously identified in other insects. Quantitative reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction analysis showed that pxslo was expressed in all the developmental stages of P. xylostella, with the highest level in adults. In the larval stage, pxslo was mainly expressed in the head and epidermis, while a limited protein was expressed in the midgut. In the adult stage, pxslo was highly expressed in the head, followed by in the ovarian tubule, and was not expressed in the testis or wings. These results suggest that BKCa plays an important physiological role in P. xylostella and provides useful information for the functional study and screening of BKCa inhibitors.
Keywords: BKCa; IBTX; Plutella xylostella; alternative splicing; gene expression pattern.
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