Genomic and Functional Analysis of the Toxic Effect of Tachyplesin I on the Embryonic Development of Zebrafish

Tachyplesin I (TP I) is an antimicrobial peptide isolated from the hemocytes of the horseshoe crab. With the developments of DNA microarray technology, the genetic analysis of the toxic effect of TP I on embryo was originally considered in our recent study. Based on our microarray data of the embryonic samples of zebrafish treated with the different doses of TP I, we performed a series of statistical data analyses to explore the toxic effect of TP I at the genomic level. In this paper, we first employed the hexaMplot to illustrate the continuous variation of the gene expressions of the embryonic cells treated with the different doses of TP I. The probabilistic model-based Hough transform was used to classify these differentially coexpressed genes of TP I on the zebrafish embryos. As a result, three line rays supported with the corresponding 174 genes were detected in our analysis. Some biological processes of the featured genes, such as antigen processing, nuclear chromatin, and structural constituent of eye lens, were significantly filtered with the smaller P values.