Genome-wide transcriptome analysis shows extensive alternative RNA splicing in the zoonotic parasite Schistosoma japonicum

BMC Genomics

Research Article

Shuai Liu¹  Pengfei Cai¹  Chuang Wu¹  Xianyu Piao¹  Nan Hou¹  Qijun Chen² 

[1] MOH Key Laboratory of Systems Biology of Pathogens, Institute of Pathogen Biology, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences & Peking Union Medical College, Beijing, People’s Republic of China;MOH Key Laboratory of Systems Biology of Pathogens, Institute of Pathogen Biology, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences & Peking Union Medical College, Beijing, People’s Republic of China;Key Laboratory of Zoonosis, Ministry of Education, Institute of Zoonosis, Jilin University, Changchun, People’s Republic of China;

关键词: Alternative Splice;    Schistosoma;    Alternative Splice Event;    Intron Retention;    Male Parasite;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2164-15-715

 received in 2014-07-22, accepted in 2014-08-19,  发布年份 2014

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundSchistosoma japonicum is a pathogen of the phylum Platyhelminthes that causes zoonotic schistosomiasis in China and Southeast Asian countries where a lack of efficient measures has hampered disease control. The development of tools for diagnosis of acute and chronic infection and for novel antiparasite reagents relies on understanding the biological mechanisms that the parasite exploits.ResultsIn this study, the polyadenylated transcripts from the male and female S. japonicum were sequenced using a high-throughput RNA-seq technique. Bioinformatic and experimental analyses focused on post-transcriptional RNA processing, which revealed extensive alternative splicing events in the adult stage of the parasite. The numbers of protein-coding sequences identified in the transcriptomes of the female and male S. japonicum were 15,939 and 19,501 respectively, which is more than predicted from the annotated genome sequence. Further, we identified four types of post-transcriptional processing, or alternative splicing, in both female and male worms of S. japonicum: exon skipping, intron retention, and alternative donor and acceptor sites. Unlike mammalian organisms, in S. japonicum, the alternative donor and acceptor sites were more common than the other two types of post-transcriptional processing. In total, respectively 13,438 and 16,507 alternative splicing events were predicted in the transcriptomes of female and male S. japonicum.ConclusionsBy using RNA-seq technology, we obtained the global transcriptomes of male and female S. japonicum. These results further provide a comprehensive view of the global transcriptome of S. japonicum. The findings of a substantial level of alternative splicing events dynamically occurring in S. japonicum parasitization of mammalian hosts suggest complicated transcriptional and post-transcriptional regulation mechanisms employed by the parasite. These data should not only significantly improve the re-annotation of the genome sequences but also should provide new information about the biology of the parasite.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Piao et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2014. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.