Digital Marine Bioprospecting: Mining New Neurotoxin Drug Candidates from the Transcriptomes of Cold-Water Sea Anemones

Marine Drugs

Ilona Urbarova¹  Bård Ove Karlsen¹  Siri Okkenhaug¹  Ole Morten Seternes²  Steinar D. Johansen¹ 

[1] RNA and Transcriptomics Group, Department of Medical Biology, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Tromsø, N9037 Tromsø, Norway;Pharmacology Group, Department of Pharmacy, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Tromsø, N9037 Tromsø, Norway;

关键词: deep sequencing;    drug discovery;    marine bioprospecting;    neurotoxin;    sea anemone;    transcriptomics;   

DOI  :  10.3390/md10102265

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

Marine bioprospecting is the search for new marine bioactive compounds and large-scale screening in extracts represents the traditional approach. Here, we report an alternative complementary protocol, called digital marine bioprospecting, based on deep sequencing of transcriptomes. We sequenced the transcriptomes from the adult polyp stage of two cold-water sea anemones, Bolocera tuediae and Hormathia digitata. We generated approximately 1.1 million quality-filtered sequencing reads by 454 pyrosequencing, which were assembled into approximately 120,000 contigs and 220,000 single reads. Based on annotation and gene ontology analysis we profiled the expressed mRNA transcripts according to known biological processes. As a proof-of-concept we identified polypeptide toxins with a potential blocking activity on sodium and potassium voltage-gated channels from digital transcriptome libraries.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2012 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.