Ochroconis mirabilis, a recently introduced water-borne dematiaceous fungus, is occasionally isolated from human skin lesions and nails. We identified an isolate of O. mirabilis from a skin scraping with morphological and molecular studies. Its genome was then sequenced and analysed for genetic features related to classification and biological characteristics.
The estuarine firefly, Pteroptyx tener, aggregates in the thousands in mangrove trees lining tidal rivers in Southeast Asia where they engage one another in a nocturnal, pre-mating ritual of synchronised courtship flashes. Unfortunately, populations of the species by virtue of being restricted to isolated estuarine rivers systems in the region, are at risk of genetic isolation. Because of this concern we undertook the task of sequencing and characterising the mitochondrial DNA genome of P. tener, as the first step towards helping us to characterise and better understand their genetic diversity. We sequenced and assembled the mitochondrial DNA genome of P. tener from two male and female specimens from the district of Kuala Selangor in Peninsular Malaysia and announce the molecules in this publication. We also reconstructed the phylogenetic trees of all available lampyrids mitogenomes and suggest the need to re-examine our current understanding of their classification which have largely been based on morphological data and the cox1 gene. Separately, our analysis of codon usage patterns among lampyrid mitogenomes showed that the codon usage in a majority of the protein-coding genes were non-neutral. Codon usage patterns between mitogenome sequences of P. tener were, however, largely neutral. Our findings demonstrate the usefulness of mitochondrial genes/mitogenomes for analysing both inter- and intra- specific variation in the Lampyridae to aid in species discovery in this highly variable genus; and elucidate the phylogenetic relationships of Pteroptyx spp. from the region.
High-quality and complete reference genome assemblies are fundamental for the application of genomics to biology, disease, and biodiversity conservation. However, such assemblies are available for only a few non-microbial species1-4. To address this issue, the international Genome 10K (G10K) consortium5,6 has worked over a five-year period to evaluate and develop cost-effective methods for assembling highly accurate and nearly complete reference genomes. Here we present lessons learned from generating assemblies for 16 species that represent six major vertebrate lineages. We confirm that long-read sequencing technologies are essential for maximizing genome quality, and that unresolved complex repeats and haplotype heterozygosity are major sources of assembly error when not handled correctly. Our assemblies correct substantial errors, add missing sequence in some of the best historical reference genomes, and reveal biological discoveries. These include the identification of many false gene duplications, increases in gene sizes, chromosome rearrangements that are specific to lineages, a repeated independent chromosome breakpoint in bat genomes, and a canonical GC-rich pattern in protein-coding genes and their regulatory regions. Adopting these lessons, we have embarked on the Vertebrate Genomes Project (VGP), an international effort to generate high-quality, complete reference genomes for all of the roughly 70,000 extant vertebrate species and to help to enable a new era of discovery across the life sciences.
Prostate cancer is a highly heritable disease with large disparities in incidence rates across ancestry populations. We conducted a multiancestry meta-analysis of prostate cancer genome-wide association studies (107,247 cases and 127,006 controls) and identified 86 new genetic risk variants independently associated with prostate cancer risk, bringing the total to 269 known risk variants. The top genetic risk score (GRS) decile was associated with odds ratios that ranged from 5.06 (95% confidence interval (CI), 4.84-5.29) for men of European ancestry to 3.74 (95% CI, 3.36-4.17) for men of African ancestry. Men of African ancestry were estimated to have a mean GRS that was 2.18-times higher (95% CI, 2.14-2.22), and men of East Asian ancestry 0.73-times lower (95% CI, 0.71-0.76), than men of European ancestry. These findings support the role of germline variation contributing to population differences in prostate cancer risk, with the GRS offering an approach for personalized risk prediction.
Adequate genetic information is essential for sustainable crustacean fisheries and aquaculture management. The commercially important orange mud crab, Scylla olivacea, is prevalent in Southeast Asia region and is highly sought after. Although it is a suitable aquaculture candidate, full domestication of this species is hampered by the lack of knowledge about the sexual maturation process and the molecular mechanisms behind it, especially in males. To date, data on its whole genome is yet to be reported for S. olivacea. The available transcriptome data published previously on this species focus primarily on females and the role of central nervous system in reproductive development. De novo transcriptome sequencing for the testes of S. olivacea from immature, maturing and mature stages were performed. A total of approximately 144 million high-quality reads were generated and de novo assembled into 160,569 transcripts with a total length of 142.2 Mb. Approximately 15-23% of the total assembled transcripts were annotated when compared to public protein sequence databases (i.e. UniProt database, Interpro database, Pfam database and Drosophila melanogaster protein database), and GO-categorised with GO Ontology terms. A total of 156,181 high-quality Single-Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs) were mined from the transcriptome data of present study. Transcriptome comparison among the testes of different maturation stages revealed one gene (beta crystallin like gene) with the most significant differential expression-up-regulated in immature stage and down-regulated in maturing and mature stages. This was further validated by qRT-PCR. In conclusion, a comprehensive transcriptome of the testis of orange mud crabs from different maturation stages were obtained. This report provides an invaluable resource for enhancing our understanding of this species' genome structure and biology, as expressed and controlled by their gonads.
Haloxylon persicum is an endangered western Asiatic desert plant species, which survives under extreme environmental conditions. In this study, we focused on transcriptome analysis of H. persicum to understand the molecular mechanisms associated with drought tolerance. Two different periods of polyethylene glycol (PEG)-induced drought stress (48 h and 72 h) were imposed on H. persicum under in vitro conditions, which resulted in 18 million reads, subsequently assembled by de novo method with more than 8000 transcripts in each treatment. The N50 values were 1437, 1467, and 1524 for the control sample, 48 h samples, and 72 h samples, respectively. The gene ontology (GO) and Kyoto encyclopedia of genes and genomes (KEGG) pathway analysis resulted in enrichment of mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) and plant hormone signal transduction pathways under PEG-induced drought conditions. The differential gene expression analysis (DGEs) revealed significant changes in the expression pattern between the control and the treated samples. The KEGG analysis resulted in mapping transcripts with 138 different pathways reported in plants. The differential expression of drought-responsive transcription factors depicts the possible signaling cascades involved in drought tolerance. The present study provides greater insight into the fundamental transcriptome reprogramming of desert plants under drought.
Rafflesia possesses unique biological features and known primarily for producing the world's largest and existing as a single flower. However, to date, little is known about key regulators participating in Rafflesia flower development. In order to further understand the molecular mechanism that regulates Rafflesia cantleyi flower development, RNA-seq data from three developmental stages of floral bud, representing the floral organ primordia initiation, floral organ differentiation, and floral bud outgrowth, were analysed. A total of 89,890 transcripts were assembled of which up to 35% could be annotated based on homology search. Advanced transcriptome analysis using K-mean clustering on the differentially expressed genes (DEGs) was able to identify 12 expression clusters that reflect major trends and key transitional states, which correlate to specific developmental stages. Through this, comparative gene expression analysis of different floral bud stages identified various transcription factors related to flower development. The members of WRKY, NAC, bHLH, and MYB families are the most represented among the DEGs, suggesting their important function in flower development. Furthermore, pathway enrichment analysis also revealed DEGs that are involved in various phytohormone signal transduction events such as auxin and auxin transport, cytokinin and gibberellin biosynthesis. Results of this study imply that transcription factors and phytohormone signalling pathways play major role in Rafflesia floral bud development. This study provides an invaluable resource for molecular studies of the flower development process in Rafflesia and other plant species.
The importance of plant secondary metabolites for both mankind and the plant itself has long been established. However, despite extensive research on plant secondary metabolites, plant secondary metabolism and its regulation still remained poorly characterized. In this present study, cDNA-amplified fragment length polymorphism (cDNA-AFLP) transcript profiling was applied to generate the expression profiles of Polygonum minus in response to salicylic acid (SA) and methyl jasmonate (MeJA) elicitations. This study reveals two different sets of genes induced by SA and MeJA, respectively where stress-related genes were proved to lead to the expression of genes involved in plant secondary metabolite biosynthetic pathways. A total of 98 transcript-derived fragments (TDFs) were up-regulated, including 46 from SA-treated and 52 from MeJA-treated samples. The cDNA-AFLP transcripts generated using 64 different Mse1/Taq1 primer combinations showed that treatments with SA and MeJA induced genes mostly involved in scavenging reactive oxygen species, including zeaxanthin epoxidase, cytosolic ascorbate peroxidase 1 and peroxidase. Of these stress-related genes, 15 % of other annotated TDFs are involved mainly in secondary metabolic processes where among these, two genes encoding (+)-delta cadinene synthase and cinnamoyl-CoA reductase were highlighted.
Panduratin A extracted from Boesenbergia rotunda is a flavonoid reported to possess a range of medicinal indications which include anti-dengue, anti-HIV, anti-cancer, antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties. Boesenbergia rotunda is a plant from the Zingiberaceae family commonly used as a food ingredient and traditional medicine in Southeast Asia and China. Reports on the health benefits of secondary metabolites extracted from Boesenbergia rotunda over the last few years has resulted in rising demands for panduratin A. However large scale extraction has been hindered by the naturally low abundance of the compound and limited knowledge of its biosynthetic pathway.
The crucifix crab, Charybdis feriatus, which mainly inhabits Indo-Pacific region, is regarded as one of the most high-potential species for domestication and incorporation into the aquaculture sector. However, the regulatory mechanisms of sex determination and differentiation of this species remain unclear. To identify candidate genes involved in sex determination and differentiation, high throughput sequencing of transcriptome from the testis and ovary of C. feriatus was performed by the Illumina platform. After removing adaptor primers, low-quality sequences and very short (<50 nt) reads, we obtained 80.9 million and 66.2 million clean reads from testis and ovary, respectively. A total of 86,433 unigenes were assembled, and ~43% (37,500 unigenes) were successfully annotated to the NR, NT, Swiss-Prot, KEGG, COG, GO databases. By comparing the testis and ovary libraries, we obtained 27,636 differentially expressed genes. Some candidate genes involved in the sex determination and differentiation of C. feriatus were identified, such as vasa, pgds, vgr, hsp90, dsx-f, fem-1, and gpr. In addition, 88,608 simple sequence repeats were obtained, and 61,929 and 77,473 single nucleotide polymorphisms from testis and ovary were detected, respectively. The transcriptome profiling was validated by quantitative real-time PCR in 30 selected genes, which showed a good consistency. The present study is the first high-throughput transcriptome sequencing of C. feriatus. These findings will be useful for future functional analysis of sex-associated genes and molecular marker-assisted selections in C. feriatus.
Physiological responses to stress are controlled by expression of a large number of genes, many of which are regulated by microRNAs. Since most banana cultivars are salt-sensitive, improved understanding of genetic regulation of salt induced stress responses in banana can support future crop management and improvement in the face of increasing soil salinity related to irrigation and climate change. In this study we focused on determining miRNA and their targets that respond to NaCl exposure and used transcriptome sequencing of RNA and small RNA from control and NaCl-treated banana roots to assemble a cultivar-specific reference transcriptome and identify orthologous and Musa-specific miRNA responding to salinity. We observed that, banana roots responded to salinity stress with changes in expression for a large number of genes (9.5% of 31,390 expressed unigenes) and reduction in levels of many miRNA, including several novel miRNA and banana-specific miRNA-target pairs. Banana roots expressed a unique set of orthologous and Musa-specific miRNAs of which 59 respond to salt stress in a dose-dependent manner. Gene expression patterns of miRNA compared with those of their predicted mRNA targets indicated that a majority of the differentially expressed miRNAs were down-regulated in response to increased salinity, allowing increased expression of targets involved in diverse biological processes including stress signaling, stress defence, transport, cellular homeostasis, metabolism and other stress-related functions. This study may contribute to the understanding of gene regulation and abiotic stress response of roots and the high-throughput sequencing data sets generated may serve as important resources related to salt tolerance traits for functional genomic studies and genetic improvement in banana.
Agar and agarose have wide applications in food and pharmaceutical industries. Knowledge on the genome of red seaweeds that produce them is still lacking. To fill the gap in genome analyses of these red algae, we have sequenced the nuclear and organellar genomes of an agarophyte, Gracilaria changii. The partial nuclear genome sequence of G. changii has a total length of 35.8Mb with 10,912 predicted protein coding sequences. Only 39.4% predicted proteins were found to have significant matches to protein sequences in SwissProt. The chloroplast genome of G. changii is 183,855bp with a total of 201 open reading frames (ORFs), 29 tRNAs and 3 rRNAs predicted. Five genes: ssrA, leuC and leuD CP76_p173 (orf139) and pbsA were absent in the chloroplast genome of G. changii. The genome information is valuable in accelerating functional studies of individual genes and resolving evolutionary relationship of red seaweeds.