Transcriptomic Analysis of Marine Gastropod Hemifusus tuba Provides Novel Insights into Conotoxin Genes.

Ronghua Li,Chunlin Wang,Weiwei Song,Herve Migaud,Michaël Bekaert,Changkao Mu,Luning Wu

doi:10.3390/md17080466

Abstract

The marine gastropod Hemifusus tuba is served as a luxury food in Asian countries and used in traditional Chinese medicine to treat lumbago and deafness. The lack of genomic data on H. tuba is a barrier to aquaculture development and functional characteristics of potential bioactive molecules are poorly understood. In the present study, we used high-throughput sequencing technologies to generate the first transcriptomic database of H. tuba. A total of 41 unique conopeptides were retrieved from 44 unigenes, containing 6-cysteine frameworks belonging to four superfamilies. Duplication of mature regions and alternative splicing were also found in some of the conopeptides, and the de novo assembly identified a total of 76,306 transcripts with an average length of 824.6 nt, of which including 75,620 (99.1%) were annotated. In addition, simple sequence repeats (SSRs) detection identified 14,000 unigenes containing 20,735 SSRs, among which, 23 polymorphic SSRs were screened. Thirteen of these markers could be amplified in Hemifusus ternatanus and seven in Rapana venosa. This study provides reports of conopeptide genes in Buccinidae for the first time as well as genomic resources for further drug development, gene discovery and population resource studies of this species.

Highlights

Marine organisms represent half of the total global biodiversity, and as such, they provide an abundance of chemical space to be explored for peptide-based drug discovery [1]
The reads were deposited in the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) European Nucleotide Archive (ENA) project ID PRJEB30840
The high-quality reads were mapped back to the assembled transcripts to assess the quality of the assembly; as a result, 54.5% of the reads were successfully mapped to the assembled final transcriptome, while 82.9% were mapped to the raw/unfiltered transcriptome

Summary

Introduction

Marine organisms represent half of the total global biodiversity, and as such, they provide an abundance of chemical space to be explored for peptide-based drug discovery [1]. The toxic peptides found in marine organisms, such as jellyfish, cone snails, sea urchins and lionfish, are of great biotechnological interest for applications in medicine. A diverse range of predatory marine gastropods produce toxins (e.g., Conoidae superfamily), yet most of these molecules remain unknown or uncharacterised [3]. H. tuba is served as luxury food in some Asian countries, popular for its delicious taste and high nutritive value. The economic value of H. tuba has led to increased research efforts in population genetics [5], conservation [6,7] and aquaculture studies [8,9].

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