Transcriptome sequencing and positive selected genes analysis of Bombyx mandarina

PLoS One. 2015 Mar 25;10(3):e0122837. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0122837. eCollection 2015.

Abstract

The wild silkworm Bombyx mandarina is widely believed to be an ancestor of the domesticated silkworm, Bombyx mori. Silkworms are often used as a model for studying the mechanism of species domestication. Here, we performed transcriptome sequencing of the wild silkworm using an Illumina HiSeq2000 platform. We produced 100,004,078 high-quality reads and assembled them into 50,773 contigs with an N50 length of 1764 bp and a mean length of 941.62 bp. A total of 33,759 unigenes were identified, with 12,805 annotated in the Nr database, 8273 in the Pfam database, and 9093 in the Swiss-Prot database. Expression profile analysis found significant differential expression of 1308 unigenes between the middle silk gland (MSG) and posterior silk gland (PSG). Three sericin genes (sericin 1, sericin 2, and sericin 3) were expressed specifically in the MSG and three fibroin genes (fibroin-H, fibroin-L, and fibroin/P25) were expressed specifically in the PSG. In addition, 32,297 Single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and 361 insertion-deletions (INDELs) were detected. Comparison with the domesticated silkworm p50/Dazao identified 5,295 orthologous genes, among which 400 might have experienced or to be experiencing positive selection by Ka/Ks analysis. These data and analyses presented here provide insights into silkworm domestication and an invaluable resource for wild silkworm genomics research.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Animals
  • Bombyx / genetics*
  • Databases, Genetic
  • High-Throughput Nucleotide Sequencing
  • Molecular Sequence Annotation
  • Open Reading Frames / genetics
  • Polymorphism, Single Nucleotide
  • Sequence Analysis, RNA
  • Transcriptome*

Grants and funding

This work was supported by grants from the National Basic Research Program of China (973 program, 2012CB114600), the National High-tech R&D Program (863 program, 2011AA100306), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (no. 31001034), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (XDJK2013C004). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.