Semaphorin-1a-like gene plays an important role in the embryonic development of silkworm, Bombyx mori

Fuyin-lethal red egg (Fuyin-lre) is a red egg mutant discovered from the germplasm resource Fuyin of Bombyx mori. The embryo of Fuyin-lre stops developing at the late stage of gastrulation due to chromosome structural variation. In this work, precise mutation sites at both ends of the mutated region were determined, and two inserted sequences with lengths of 1232 bp and 1845 bp were obtained at both ends of the mutation region. Interestingly, a bmmar1 transposon was detected in the inserted 1845 bp sequence. Bmmar1 possesses features of the Tcl/mariner superfamily of transposable elements (TEs), which belongs to class II TEs that use a DNA-mediated “cut and paste” mechanism to transpose. This finding suggests that Fuyin-lre mutation might be related to the “cut and paste” action of bmmar1. The mutation resulted in the deletion of 9 genes in the mutation region, of which the red egg gene re (BMSK0002766) did not affect embryonic development of B. mori, and the BMSK0002765 gene was unexpressed during the early stage of embryonic development. The RNA interference results of the remaining 7 genes suggest that the semaphorin-1a-like gene (BMSK0002764) had a major contribution to the embryonic lethality of Fuyin-lre.