Comparative transcriptome analysis between planarian Dugesia japonica and other platyhelminth species

BACKGROUND: Planarians are considered to be among the extant animals close to one of the earliest groups of organisms that acquired a central nervous system (CNS) during evolution. Planarians have a bilobed brain with nine lateral branches from which a variety of external signals are projected into...

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Autores principales: Nishimura, Osamu, Hirao, Yukako, Tarui, Hiroshi, Agata, Kiyokazu
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2012
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3507646/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22747887
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1471-2164-13-289
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author Nishimura, Osamu
Hirao, Yukako
Tarui, Hiroshi
Agata, Kiyokazu
author_facet Nishimura, Osamu
Hirao, Yukako
Tarui, Hiroshi
Agata, Kiyokazu
author_sort Nishimura, Osamu
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: Planarians are considered to be among the extant animals close to one of the earliest groups of organisms that acquired a central nervous system (CNS) during evolution. Planarians have a bilobed brain with nine lateral branches from which a variety of external signals are projected into different portions of the main lobes. Various interneurons process different signals to regulate behavior and learning/memory. Furthermore, planarians have robust regenerative ability and are attracting attention as a new model organism for the study of regeneration. Here we conducted large-scale EST analysis of the head region of the planarian Dugesia japonica to construct a database of the head-region transcriptome, and then performed comparative analyses among related species. RESULTS: A total of 54,752 high-quality EST reads were obtained from a head library of the planarian Dugesia japonica, and 13,167 unigene sequences were produced by de novo assembly. A new method devised here revealed that proteins related to metabolism and defense mechanisms have high flexibility of amino-acid substitutions within the planarian family. Eight-two CNS-development genes were found in the planarian (cf. C. elegans 3; chicken 129). Comparative analysis revealed that 91% of the planarian CNS-development genes could be mapped onto the schistosome genome, but one-third of these shared genes were not expressed in the schistosome. CONCLUSIONS: We constructed a database that is a useful resource for comparative planarian transcriptome studies. Analysis comparing homologous genes between two planarian species showed that the potential of genes is important for accumulation of amino-acid substitutions. The presence of many CNS-development genes in our database supports the notion that the planarian has a fundamental brain with regard to evolution and development at not only the morphological/functional, but also the genomic, level. In addition, our results indicate that the planarian CNS-development genes already existed before the divergence of planarians and schistosomes from their common ancestor.
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spelling pubmed-35076462012-11-28 Comparative transcriptome analysis between planarian Dugesia japonica and other platyhelminth species Nishimura, Osamu Hirao, Yukako Tarui, Hiroshi Agata, Kiyokazu BMC Genomics Research Article BACKGROUND: Planarians are considered to be among the extant animals close to one of the earliest groups of organisms that acquired a central nervous system (CNS) during evolution. Planarians have a bilobed brain with nine lateral branches from which a variety of external signals are projected into different portions of the main lobes. Various interneurons process different signals to regulate behavior and learning/memory. Furthermore, planarians have robust regenerative ability and are attracting attention as a new model organism for the study of regeneration. Here we conducted large-scale EST analysis of the head region of the planarian Dugesia japonica to construct a database of the head-region transcriptome, and then performed comparative analyses among related species. RESULTS: A total of 54,752 high-quality EST reads were obtained from a head library of the planarian Dugesia japonica, and 13,167 unigene sequences were produced by de novo assembly. A new method devised here revealed that proteins related to metabolism and defense mechanisms have high flexibility of amino-acid substitutions within the planarian family. Eight-two CNS-development genes were found in the planarian (cf. C. elegans 3; chicken 129). Comparative analysis revealed that 91% of the planarian CNS-development genes could be mapped onto the schistosome genome, but one-third of these shared genes were not expressed in the schistosome. CONCLUSIONS: We constructed a database that is a useful resource for comparative planarian transcriptome studies. Analysis comparing homologous genes between two planarian species showed that the potential of genes is important for accumulation of amino-acid substitutions. The presence of many CNS-development genes in our database supports the notion that the planarian has a fundamental brain with regard to evolution and development at not only the morphological/functional, but also the genomic, level. In addition, our results indicate that the planarian CNS-development genes already existed before the divergence of planarians and schistosomes from their common ancestor. BioMed Central 2012-06-29 /pmc/articles/PMC3507646/ /pubmed/22747887 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1471-2164-13-289 Text en Copyright ©2012 Nishimura et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0 This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Nishimura, Osamu
Hirao, Yukako
Tarui, Hiroshi
Agata, Kiyokazu
Comparative transcriptome analysis between planarian Dugesia japonica and other platyhelminth species
title Comparative transcriptome analysis between planarian Dugesia japonica and other platyhelminth species
title_full Comparative transcriptome analysis between planarian Dugesia japonica and other platyhelminth species
title_fullStr Comparative transcriptome analysis between planarian Dugesia japonica and other platyhelminth species
title_full_unstemmed Comparative transcriptome analysis between planarian Dugesia japonica and other platyhelminth species
title_short Comparative transcriptome analysis between planarian Dugesia japonica and other platyhelminth species
title_sort comparative transcriptome analysis between planarian dugesia japonica and other platyhelminth species
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3507646/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22747887
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1471-2164-13-289
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