An evolutionarily conserved transcriptional response to viral infection in Caenorhabditis nematodes

BMC Genomics

Research Article

Kevin Chen¹  Hongbing Jiang¹  Carl J. Franz¹  Yanfang Jiang¹  David Wang¹ 

[1] Departments of Molecular Microbiology and Pathology and Immunology, Washington University in St. Louis, School of Medicine, 660 S. Euclid Avenue, St, Louis, MO, USA;

关键词: Host-virus interaction;    Orsay virus;    Santeuil virus;    N. parisii;    C. elegans;    C. briggsae;    Pathogen infection;    Transcriptional profile;   

DOI  :  10.1186/s12864-017-3689-3

 received in 2016-12-01, accepted in 2017-04-07,  发布年份 2017

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundCaenorhabditis elegans is a powerful model organism for probing many biological processes including host-pathogen interactions with bacteria and fungi. The recent identification of nematode viruses that naturally infect C. elegans and Caenorhabditis briggsae provides a unique opportunity to define host-virus interactions in these model hosts.ResultsWe analyzed the transcriptional response of pathogen infected C. elegans and C. briggsae by RNA-seq. We identified a total of 320 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) in C. elegans following Orsay virus infection. The DEGs of known function were enriched for ubiquitin ligase related genes; however, the majority of the genes were of unknown function. Interestingly, many DEGs that responded to Orsay virus infection were similar to those induced by Nematocida parisii infection, which is a natural microsporidia pathogen of C. elegans that like Orsay virus infects intestinal cells. Furthermore, comparison of the Orsay virus DEGs in C. elegans to Santeuil virus DEGs in C. briggsae identified 58 C. elegans genes whose orthologs were likewise differentially expressed in C. briggsae, thereby defining an evolutionarily conserved response to viral infection.ConclusionsThe two different species C. elegans and C. briggsae, which diverged ~18 million years ago, share a common set of transcriptionally responsive genes to viral infection. Furthermore, a subset of these genes were also differentially expressed following infection by a eukaryotic pathogen, N. parisii, suggesting that these genes may constitute a broader pan-microbial response to infection.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© The Author(s). 2017