Gaitán-Espitia JD et al. (2016), Functional insights into the testis transcripto...

ECB-ART-44992

Sci Rep 2016 Nov 02;6:36516. doi: 10.1038/srep36516.

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Functional insights into the testis transcriptome of the edible sea urchin Loxechinus albus.

Gaitán-Espitia JD , Sánchez R , Bruning P , Cárdenas L .

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The edible sea urchin Loxechinus albus (Molina, 1782) is a keystone species in the littoral benthic systems of the Pacific coast of South America. The international demand for high-quality gonads of this echinoderm has led to an extensive exploitation and decline of its natural populations. Consequently, a more thorough understanding of L. albus gonad development and gametogenesis could provide valuable resources for aquaculture applications, management, conservation and studies about the evolution of functional and structural pathways that underlie the reproductive toolkit of marine invertebrates. Using a high-throughput sequencing technology, we explored the male gonad transcriptome of this highly fecund sea urchin. Through a de novo assembly approach we obtained 42,530 transcripts of which 15,544 (36.6%) had significant alignments to known proteins in public databases. From these transcripts, approximately 73% were functionally annotated allowing the identification of several candidate genes that are likely to play a central role in developmental processes, nutrient reservoir activity, sexual reproduction, gamete generation, meiosis, sex differentiation, sperm motility, male courtship behavior and fertilization. Additionally, comparisons with the male gonad transcriptomes of other echinoderms revealed several conserved orthologous genes, suggesting that similar functional and structural pathways underlie the reproductive development in this group and other marine invertebrates.

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Genes referenced: LOC100887844

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References [+] :

Aivatiadou, Impaired fertility and spermiogenetic disorders with loss of cell adhesion in male mice expressing an interfering Rap1 mutant. 2007, Pubmed

	Figure 1. (A) Schematic flowchart shows the molecular biology and bioinformatic methods employed in this study. N50 is defined as the length for which the collection of all contigs of that length or longer covers at least half an assembly. L50 is defined as the number of contigs equal to or longer than N50. (B) Length distribution of unigenes. (C) Top BLASTx hit species distribution obtained against the NCBI non-redundant (nr) protein database.
	Figure 2. Unigenes homology to KEGG genes obtained from the KAAS server.(A) Number of sequences assigned to each sub-category of the reference hierarchy KOs. (B) Percentage distribution of the five top KEGG orthology categories in the male gonad transcriptome of Loxechinus albus.
	Figure 3. Distribution of Gene Ontology (GO) assignments of assembled unigenes of L. albus.GO categories are shown on the x-axis grouped into three main categories: biological processes, cellular components and molecular functions. The y-axis indicates the percentage of total genes in each category.
	Figure 4. Comparisons of orthologous clusters among male gonad transcriptomes of the sea urchins Loxechinus albus, Arbacia lixula, Evechinus chloroticus, Strongylocentrotus purpuratus, and the sea stars Patiria miniata and Acanthaster planci.