Annotation of glycolysis, gluconeogenesis, and trehaloneogenesis pathways provide insight into carbohydrate metabolism in the Asian citrus psyllid.

Blessy Tamayo,Lukas A Mueller,Samuel Adkins,Chad Vosburg,Mirella Flores-Gonzalez,Anuja Mathew,Kyle Kercher,Susan J Brown,Crissy Massimino,Joshua B Benoit,Margaryta R Jernigan,Wayne B Hunter,Douglas Harper,Naftali Panitz,Tom D’Elia,Prashant S Hosmani,Denisse L Hasan,Surya Saha,Teresa D Shippy

doi:10.46471/gigabyte.41

Abstract

Citrus greening disease is caused by the pathogen Candidatus Liberibacter asiaticus and transmitted by the Asian citrus psyllid, Diaphorina citri. No curative treatment or significant prevention mechanism exists for this disease, which causes economic losses from reduced citrus production. A high-quality genome of D. citri is being manually annotated to provide accurate gene models to identify novel control targets and increase understanding of this pest. Here, we annotated 25 D. citri genes involved in glycolysis and gluconeogenesis, and seven in trehaloneogenesis. Comparative analysis showed that glycolysis genes in D. citri are highly conserved but copy numbers vary. Analysis of expression levels revealed upregulation of several enzymes in the glycolysis pathway in the thorax, consistent with the primary use of glucose by thoracic flight muscles. Manually annotating these core metabolic pathways provides accurate genomic foundation for developing gene-targeting therapeutics to control D. citri.

Highlights

IntroductionA recent, nearly complete genome with significantly improved gene accuracy has been generated, providing a valuable dataset for the establishment of gene-targeted strategies to suppress psyllid populations (opensource: Diaci_v3.0, www.citrusgreening.org [12]; USDA-NIFA grant 2015-70016-23028)
Orthologous protein sequences for the glycolysis, gluconeogenesis, and trehaloneogenesis pathways were obtained from the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) protein database [56] and were used to BLAST the D. citri MCOT (Maker (RRID:SCR_005309), Cufflinks (RRID:SCR_014597), Oases (RRID:SCR_011896), and Trinity (RRID:SCR_013048)) protein database to find predicted protein models [25]
Manual annotation of the central metabolic pathways of glycolysis, gluconeogenesis, and trehaloneogenesis provides the accurate gene models required for development of molecular therapeutics to target D. citri

Summary

Introduction

A recent, nearly complete genome with significantly improved gene accuracy has been generated, providing a valuable dataset for the establishment of gene-targeted strategies to suppress psyllid populations (opensource: Diaci_v3.0, www.citrusgreening.org [12]; USDA-NIFA grant 2015-70016-23028) As part of this genome project, we manually annotated genes in critical pathways to provide the quality gene models required to design molecular therapeutics such as RNA interference (RNAi) [13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21], antisense oligonucleotides (ASO) [16, 20, 22] and gene editing (CRISPR) [23, 24]. RNAi, as a biopesticide, and strategies for delivery and applications to target insect pests and viral pathogens have been thoroughly reviewed [50,51,52,53,54]

Methods

Conclusion