Gudenkauf BM and Hewson I (2015), Metatranscriptomic Analysis of Pycnopodia helia...

ECB-ART-44023

PLoS One 2015 May 08;105:e0128150. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0128150.

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Metatranscriptomic Analysis of Pycnopodia helianthoides (Asteroidea) Affected by Sea Star Wasting Disease.

Gudenkauf BM , Hewson I .

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Sea star wasting disease (SSWD) describes a suite of symptoms reported in asteroids of the North American Pacific Coast. We performed a metatranscriptomic survey of asymptomatic and symptomatic sunflower star (Pycnopodia helianthoides) body wall tissues to understand holobiont gene expression in tissues affected by SSWD. Metatranscriptomes were highly variable between replicate libraries, and most differentially expressed genes represented either transcripts of associated microorganisms (particularly Pseudomonas and Vibrio relatives) or low-level echinoderm transcripts of unknown function. However, the pattern of annotated host functional genes reflects enhanced apoptotic and tissue degradation processes and decreased energy metabolism, while signalling of death-related proteins was greater in asymptomatic and symptomatic tissues. Our results suggest that the body wall tissues of SSWD-affected asteroids may undergo structural changes during disease progression, and that they are stimulated to undergo autocatalytic cell death processes.

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Genes referenced: irak1bp1 LOC100887844 LOC115919910

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References [+] :

Allikian, Genetic compensation for sarcoglycan loss by integrin alpha7beta1 in muscle. 2004, Pubmed

	Fig 1. Twenty most abundant bacterial (A) and eukaryotic (B) phylogenetic affiliations amongst all four metatranscriptomic libraries prepared from Pycnopodia helianthoides tissues.Phylogenetic affilitation was determined by BLASTx analysis against the non-redundant (nr) database at NCBI. Affiliations were normalized by dividing the percentage of reads amongst all reads by the length of contigs assigned to that affilitation.
	Fig 2. Twenty most highly expressed functional annotations represented in sea star transcriptomes across all 4 libraries.Functional annotations were performed by BLASTx comparison against the non-redundant database at NCBI. Transcript frequencies were normalized by dividing percentage of reads associated with each annotation by contig length.
	Fig 3. Similarity between overall metatranscriptomic profiles based on Manhattan Distance.Similarity was calculated based on gene-level annotations, and clustered by multidimensional scaling (MDS).
	Fig 4. Graphical representation of genes that were significantly over- and under-represented amongst all genes in syptomatic and asymptomatic metatranscriptomes.Fold change was calculated by dividing length-normalized frequency in symptomatic by asymptomatic libraries.
	Fig 5. Transcripts occurring at significantly greater frequency in asymptomatic and symtomatic libraries.Only transcripts with functional annotation (vs. hypothetical or unknown function) and putative echinoderm-derived transcripts are indicated. Annotation was based on BLASTx comparison to the non-redundant (nr) database at NCBI.
	Fig 6. Graphical representation of pathways that were significantly higher in symptomatic or in asymptomatic sea stars.