Nutrigenomics in Arma chinensis: transcriptome analysis of Arma chinensis fed on artificial diet and Chinese oak silk moth Antheraea pernyi pupae

Deyu Zou; Thomas A Coudron; Chenxi Liu; Lisheng Zhang; Mengqing Wang; Hongyin Chen

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0060881

Nutrigenomics in Arma chinensis: transcriptome analysis of Arma chinensis fed on artificial diet and Chinese oak silk moth Antheraea pernyi pupae

PLoS One. 2013 Apr 11;8(4):e60881. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0060881. Print 2013.

Authors

Deyu Zou¹, Thomas A Coudron, Chenxi Liu, Lisheng Zhang, Mengqing Wang, Hongyin Chen

Affiliation

¹ Key Laboratory of Integrated Pest Management in Crops, Ministry of Agriculture, Institute of Plant Protection, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Beijing, China.

Abstract

Background: The insect predator, Arma chinensis, is capable of effectively controlling many pests, such as Colorado potato beetle, cotton bollworm, and mirid bugs. Our previous study demonstrated several life history parameters were diminished for A. chinensis reared on an artificial diet compared to a natural food source like the Chinese oak silk moth pupae. The molecular mechanisms underlying the nutritive impact of the artificial diet on A. chinensis health are unclear. So we utilized transcriptome information to better understand the impact of the artificial diet on A. chinensis at the molecular level.

Methodology/principal findings: Illumina HiSeq2000 was used to sequence 4.79 and 4.70 Gb of the transcriptome from pupae-fed and artificial diet-fed A. chinensis libraries, respectively, and a de novo transcriptome assembly was performed (Trinity short read assembler). This resulted in 112,029 and 98,724 contigs, clustered into 54,083 and 54,169 unigenes for pupae-fed and diet-fed A. chinensis, respectively. Unigenes from each sample's assembly underwent sequence splicing and redundancy removal to acquire non-redundant unigenes. We obtained 55,189 unigenes of A. chinensis, including 12,046 distinct clusters and 43,143 distinct singletons. Unigene sequences were aligned by BLASTx to nr, Swiss-Prot, KEGG and COG (E-value <10(-5)), and further aligned by BLASTn to nt (E-value <10(-5)), retrieving proteins of highest sequence similarity with the given unigenes along with their protein functional annotations. Totally, 22,964, 7,898, 18,069, 15,416, 8,066 and 5,341 unigenes were annotated in nr, nt, Swiss-Prot, KEGG, COG and GO, respectively. We compared gene expression variations and found thousands of genes were differentially expressed between pupae-fed and diet-fed A. chinensis.

Conclusions/significance: Our study provides abundant genomic data and offers comprehensive sequence information for studying A. chinensis. Additionally, the physiological roles of the differentially expressed genes enable us to predict effects of some dietary ingredients and subsequently propose formulation improvements to artificial diets.

Publication types

Comparative Study
Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Animal Nutritional Physiological Phenomena / physiology*
Animals
Computational Biology / methods
Diet*
Gene Expression Profiling / methods
Gene Expression Regulation / genetics
Gene Expression Regulation / physiology*
Heteroptera / genetics
Heteroptera / metabolism
Heteroptera / physiology*
High-Throughput Nucleotide Sequencing
Insect Control / methods*
Molecular Sequence Annotation
Moths / chemistry
Pupa / chemistry
Signal Transduction / genetics*

Grants and funding

This research was supported by the 973 Program (2013CB127602), Special Fund for Agro-scientific Research in the Public Interest (no. 201103002), Project of International Cooperation of Agriculture of China (no. 2011-G4) and Sino-America Biocontrol International Cooperation Program (no. 58-4001-4-053). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.