Abstract
Spotted seal (Phoca largha) is a critically endangered pinniped in China and South Korea. The conventional method to protect and maintain the P. largha population is to keep them captive in artificially controlled environments. However, little is known about the physiological differences between wild and captive P. largha. To generate a preliminary protein expression profile for P. largha, whole blood from wild and captive pups were subjected to a label-free comparative proteomic analysis. According to the results, 972 proteins were identified and predicted to perform functions related to various metabolic, immune, and cellular processes. Among the identified proteins, the expression level of 51 were significantly different between wild and captive P. large pups. These differentially expressed proteins were enriched in a wide range of cellular functions, including cytoskeleton, phagocytosis, proteolysis, the regulation of gene expression, and carbohydrate metabolism. The abundances of proteins involved in phagocytosis and ubiquitin-mediated proteolysis were significantly higher in the whole blood of wild P. largha pups than in captive individuals. In addition, heat shock protein 90-beta, were determined as the key protein associated with the differences in the wild and captive P. largha pups due to the most interactions of it with various differentially expressed proteins. Moreover, wild P. largha pups could be more nutritionally stressed and have more powerful immune capacities than captive pups. This study provides the first data on the protein composition of P. largha and provides useful information on the physiological characteristics for research in this species.
Highlights
Spotted seal (Phoca largha) is a critically endangered pinniped in China and South Korea
Proteins are the direct performers of biological functions, and measuring protein expression profiles is a powerful way to understand the physiological characteristics of spotted seals
To investigate the physiological functions of P. largha pups, annotations from the Gene Ontology (GO) and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) databases were extracted based on the reference transcripts that matched the identified P. largha proteins
Summary
Spotted seal (Phoca largha) is a critically endangered pinniped in China and South Korea. The expression level of 51 were significantly different between wild and captive P. large pups These differentially expressed proteins were enriched in a wide range of cellular functions, including cytoskeleton, phagocytosis, proteolysis, the regulation of gene expression, and carbohydrate metabolism. Proteins are the direct performers of biological functions, and measuring protein expression profiles is a powerful way to understand the physiological characteristics of spotted seals. Qualitative proteomics techniques based on mass spectrometry (MS), such as 2D-gel-MS, have developed into the most direct and accurate methods for identifying the proteins in animal samples[15] Such traditional techniques have many shortcomings, including their inability to quantitatively recognize the differentially expressed proteins (DEPs) and their poor detection of low-abundance proteins. Comparative proteomics research based on label-free shotgun proteomics is suitable for a more comprehensive comparison of the physiological functions between wild and captive spotted seals
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