LncRNAs in molluscan and mammalian stages of parasitic schistosomes are developmentally-regulated and coordinately expressed with protein-coding genes

Abstract

ABSTRACT Despite the low level expression of some long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs), the differential expression of specific lncRNAs plays important roles during the development of many organisms. Schistosomes, parasitic flatworms that are responsible for schistosomiasis, infects over 200 million people resulting in chronic disease and hundreds of thousands of deaths. Schistosomes have a complex life cycle that transitions between molluscan and mammalian hosts. In a molluscan snail host, the sporocyst stage develops over 5 weeks undergoing asexual reproduction to give rise to free-swimming and infectious cercariae that penetrate human skin and eventually mature into egg producing worms in mammals. The tight integration of the sporocyst to the snail host hepatopancreas hinders the -omics study in the molluscan stage, so the sporocyst transcriptome has only been examined for lncRNAs in immature in vitro samples. Here we analyzed the in vivo mature sporocyst transcriptome to identify 4,930 total lncRNAs between the molluscan and mammalian stages of the parasite. We further demonstrate that the lncRNAs are differentially expressed in a development-dependent manner. In addition, we constructed a co-expression correlation network between lncRNAs and protein-coding (PC) genes that was used to identify clusters of lncRNA transcripts with potential functional relevance. We also describe lncRNA–lncRNA and lncRNA–kinome correlations that identify lncRNAs with prospective roles in gene regulation. Finally, our results show clear differential expression patterns of lncRNAs in host-dependent development stages of S. mansoni and ascribe potential functional roles in development based on predicted intracellular interaction.