Abstract
The brine shrimp Artemia has a ZW sex determination system with ZW chromosomes in females and ZZ chromosomes in males. Artemia has been considered a promising model organism for ZW sex-determining systems, but the genes involved in sex determination and differentiation of Artemia have not yet been identified. Here, we conducted transcriptome sequencing of female and male A. franciscana using PacBio Iso-Seq and Illumina RNA-Seq techniques to identify candidate sex determination genes. Among the 42,566 transcripts obtained from Iso-Seq, 23,514 were analyzed. Of these, 2065 (8.8%) were female specific, 2513 (10.7%) were male specific, and 18,936 (80.5%) were co-expressed in females and males. Based on GO enrichment analysis and expression values, we found 10 female-biased and 29 male-biased expressed genes, including DMRT1 and Sad genes showing male-biased expression. Our results showed that DMRT1 has three isoforms with five exons, while Sad has seven isoforms with 2-11 exons. The Sad gene is involved in ecdysteroid signaling related to molting and metamorphosis in arthropods. Further studies on ecdysteroid biosynthetic genes are needed to improve our understanding of Artemia sex determination. This study will provide a valuable resource for sex determination and differentiation studies on Artemia and other crustaceans with ZW systems.
Highlights
Most animals develop into two sexes, male or female, which are generally determined by a pair of sex chromosomes
Sexual phenotypes are regulated by sex hormones or sex steroids secreted from gonads in vertebrates [16,18,19]
This study provides a basis for the sex-biased gene expression and isoform-level transcriptome study of Artemia and helps to understand sex determination and differentiation in crustacean species using the ZW sex determination system
Summary
Most animals develop into two sexes, male or female, which are generally determined by a pair of sex chromosomes. In contrast to the male-heterogametic (XY) sex determination system found in most mammals, some organisms, including birds, snakes, fish, insects, and crustaceans, have a female-heterogametic (ZW) sex determination system [1]. Many studies have been conducted on sex-determining genes in several organisms, such as mammals [2,3,4], birds [5,6,7], insects [8], and crustaceans [9,10,11,12,13,14,15]. Primary sex determination depends on the sex chromosomes and is responsible for gonadal determination [16]. Ecdysteroids, the molting hormones in invertebrates, have been proposed to play roles as sex hormones in secondary sex determination [20,21]
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