Abstract
Pardosa pseudoannulata is one of the most common wandering spiders in agricultural fields and a potentially good bioindicator for heavy metal contamination. However, little is known about the mechanisms by which spiders respond to heavy metals at the molecular level. In the present study, high-throughput transcriptome sequencing was employed to characterize the de novo transcriptome of the spiders and to identify differentially expressed genes (DEGs) after cadmium exposure. We obtained 60,489 assembled unigenes, 18,773 of which were annotated in the public databases. A total of 2939 and 2491 DEGs were detected between the libraries of two Cd-treated groups and the control. Functional enrichment analysis revealed that metabolism processes and digestive system function were predominately enriched in response to Cd stress. At the cellular and molecular levels, significantly enriched pathways in lysosomes and phagosomes as well as replication, recombination and repair demonstrated that oxidative damage resulted from Cd exposure. Based on the selected DEGs, certain critical genes involved in defence and detoxification were analysed. These results may elucidate the molecular mechanisms underlying spiders’ responses to heavy metal stress.
Highlights
Cadmium (Cd) is one of the most abundant, ubiquitous, toxic heavy metal elements in the environment [1]
To study the mRNA expression dynamics of P. pseudoannulata exposed to different concentrations of CdCl2 solution, we constructed and sequenced mRNA-seq libraries from adult female spiders treated with lower (0.2 mM, TL), or higher (2 mM, TH) concentration of Cd, and distilled water as control (TC), respectively
The number of annotated unigenes is lower than the results reported by other research groups for other invertebrate species [23,24], indicating that our knowledge of P. pseudoannulata genes is limited
Summary
Cadmium (Cd) is one of the most abundant, ubiquitous, toxic heavy metal elements in the environment [1]. The diseases resulted from the long-term exposure to the sub-lethal concentration of heavy metals are difficult to be diagnosed in a timely manner, such as Itai-itai and Minamata diseases in Japan [6]. Many studies have indicated that spiders have the ability to accumulate and withstand high concentrations of Cd [6,7]. Cd can cause oxidative damage by stimulating the formation of free radicals and reactive oxygen species (ROS), resulting in oxidative stress [11], and can even display strong genotoxic effects and may cause DNA damage to spiders at low concentrations [12]. There is growing interest to use spiders as heavy metal indicators in ecotoxicological studies [6,13,14]. Little is known about the mechanism of spider responses to Cd at the molecular level [9,11,15]
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