Premium
Annotation Parasitoid Wasp Venom Transcripts
Author(s) -
Billings Ryan,
Van Stry Melanie
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
the faseb journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.709
H-Index - 277
eISSN - 1530-6860
pISSN - 0892-6638
DOI - 10.1096/fasebj.2021.35.s1.02812
Subject(s) - biology , venom , genome , transcriptome , proteome , gene , nasonia vitripennis , genetics , drosophila melanogaster , melanogaster , evolutionary biology , computational biology , parasitoid , gene expression , host (biology) , ecology , pteromalidae
Parasitoid wasps infect other arthropod species to complete their life cycle by laying their eggs on the surface or body cavity of their host. Many species inject a venom that alters host physiology to allow eggs to complete their development. The venom contains toxins that can disrupt host immune cell signaling, metabolism, and gene regulation. Recent venom studies used an approach that combines transcriptome or genome sequencing with the purification of venom proteins and mass spectrometry to identify venom proteins. In the Genomics Education Partnership (GEP), we are annotating parasitoid wasp genes from three parasitoid species that infect fruit flies ( Drosophila melanogaster ). Here, I used the University of California Santa Cruz Genome Browser mirror that combines genome, transcriptome, and proteome data, along with sequence alignment tools, to map precise coding regions of three venom gland transcripts from Leptopilina boulardi , L. heterotoma , and Ganapsis species. Each of these transcripts aligned with the jewel wasp ( Nasonia vitrepennis ) ortholog for MDH2 and have a similar predicted gene structure to the Nasonia and Drosophila MDH2 orthologs. Additionally, the L. heterotoma transcript aligned to a predicted uncharacterized Nasonia gene. The C‐terminus of this predicted L. heterotoma protein has some similarity to the gene Shootin1 but the N‐terminus of the protein has no homology to other known proteins as determined by BLAST. These gene models will be used to further investigate venom evolution and function of venom proteins in host‐pathogen interactions.