Paralytic Peptide Binding Protein (PP-BP) Gene Expression During Egg Diapause and Its Multi-Gene Organization in the Silkworm Bombyx mori

Abstract

Paralytic peptide binding proteins (PP-BP) are 30KP proteins that show similarity to ENF binding proteins. The ENF-BP act as active regulators of ENF peptides. ENF peptides are multifunctional insect cytokines. The comparison of gene expression in diapause induced and non-diapause eggs at different time intervals after oviposition showed an upregulation of PP at 18h as well as PP-BP at 12 and 18h after oviposition along with few other genes. The current study has been taken up to investigate the role of PP as well as PP-BP in diapause induction in polyvoltine silkworms and to study the multigene organization of PP-BP in the Bombyx mori genome. The tissue specific expression analysis revealed that, PP-BP is highly expressed in fat body followed by egg and brain while no expression was observed in midgut. The expression levels of PP and PP-BP in diapause and non-diapause eggs from 0h to 48h after oviposition, validated through realtime PCR revealed that PP is highly expressed at 18 and 24h while PP-BP expression is higher at 12 and 18h time intervals suggesting their possible role in diapause induction. The whole genome survey of the PP-BP paralogous sequences revealed a total of 46 B. mori PP-BP homologs that are classified into 3 categories viz., ENF-BP, Typical 30KPs and serine/threonine rich 30KPs. These paralogous sequences are distributed on chromosomes 7, 20, 22 and 24, all 30KP and S/T rich 30KP proteins are present in the same locus of chromosome 20.