Deep sequencing technologies were used to construct the first adult female Culicoides sonorensis reference transcriptome.
Genetic and genomic tools for Culicoides biting midges are lacking, despite the fact that they vector a large number of arboviruses and other pathogens impacting humans and domestic animals world-wide. Libraries of tissue-specific transcripts expressed in response to feeding and oral virus challenge in C. sonorensis have previously been reported, but extensive genome-wide expression profiling in the midge has not. Here, we successfully used deep sequencing technologies to construct the first adult female C. sonorensis reference transcriptome, and utilized genome-wide expression profiling to elucidate the genetic response to blood and sucrose feeding over time. The adult female midge unigene consists of 19,041 genes, of which less than 7% are differentially expressed during the course of a sucrose meal, while up to 52% of the genes respond significantly in blood-fed midges, indicating hematophagy induces complex physiological processes. Many genes that were differentially expressed during blood feeding were associated with digestion (e.g. proteases, lipases), hematophagy (e.g., salivary proteins), and vitellogenesis, revealing many major metabolic and biological factors underlying these critical processes. Additionally, key genes in the vitellogenesis pathway were identified, which provides the first glimpse into the molecular basis of anautogeny for C. sonorensis. This is the first extensive transcriptome for this genus, which will serve as a framework for future expression studies and in informing a reference genome assembly and annotation. Moreover, this study will serve as a foundation for subsequent studies of genome-wide expression analyses during early virus infection and dissecting the molecular mechanisms behind vector competence in midges.
Resources in this dataset:
- Resource Title: CSV Data Dictionary for Tables 1-12.
File Name: CulicoidesReferenceTranscriptome_DataDictionary.csv
Resource Description: Defines variables and criteria for the supporting transcriptome sequence data.
- Resource Title: File S1..
File Name: pone.0098123.s003.xlsx
Resource Description: Tables S1–S12. Table S1. Sample trimming results of 2×101 bp PE Illumina. Table S2. BlastX alignment of the Culicoides unigene to the NR, and Aedes and Culex transcriptomes. Table S3. Unique GO accessions of the Culicoides transcriptome mapped to the GO database. Table S4. Top 100 genes with at least 2-fold increase in abundance in early response to a blood meal. Table S5. Effect of blood feeding on differential expression of genes in female Culicoides sonorensis. Table S6. Significant differentially expressed genes between teneral and early blood-fed C. sonorensis. Table S7. Significant differentially expressed genes between teneral and late blood-fed C. sonorensis. Table S8. Significant differentially expressed genes between early and late blood-fed C. sonorensis. Table S9. Significant differentially expressed genes between teneral and early sugar-fed C. sonorensis. Table S10. Significant differentially expressed genes between teneral and late sugar-fed C. sonorensis. Table S11. Effect of sucrose feeding on differential expression of genes in female Culicoides sonorensis. Table S12. Differential expression of putative housekeeping or reference genes in C. sonorensis. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0098123.s003
Organization: Department of Agriculture
Last updated: 2024-03-30T11:26:22.019261
Tags: anautogeny, arbovirus, ars, biting-midge, bluetongue, culicoides-sonorensis, data-gov, de-novo-transcriptome, ehdv, epizootic-hemorrhagic-disease-virus, flies, hematophagy, insects, np104, rnaseq, vector, vitellogenesis