title: Discovery of immune-related genes expressed in hemocytes of the tarantula spider Acanthoscurria gomesiana.
abstract: The present study reports the identification of immune related transcripts from hemocytes of the spider Acanthoscurria gomesiana by high throughput sequencing of expressed sequence tags (ESTs). To generate ESTs from hemocytes, two cDNA libraries were prepared: one by directional cloning (primary) and the other by the normalization of the first (normalized). A total of 7584 clones were sequenced and the identical ESTs were clustered, resulting in 3723 assembled sequences (AS). At least 20% of these sequences are putative novel genes. The automatic functional annotation of AS based on Gene Ontology revealed several abundant transcripts related to the following functional classes: hemocyanin, lectin, and structural constituents of ribosome and cytoskeleton. From this annotation, 73 transcripts possibly involved in immune response were also identified, suggesting the existence of several molecular processes not previously described for spiders, such as: pathogen recognition, coagulation, complement activation, cell adhesion and intracellular signaling pathway for the activation of cellular defenses.
authors.affiliation: Departamento de Parasitologia, Instituto de Ciências Biomédicas, Universidade de São Paulo, Avenida Prof. Lineu Prestes, 1374, CEP 05508-900 São Paulo, SP, Brazil.
authors.forename: Daniel M
authors.initials: DM
authors.lastname: Lorenzini
authors.forename: Pedro I
authors.initials: PI
authors.lastname: da Silva
authors.forename: Marcelo B
authors.initials: MB
authors.lastname: Soares
authors.forename: Paulo
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Arruda
authors.forename: João
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Setubal
authors.forename: Sirlei
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Daffre
mesh_terms: D000595:Amino Acid Sequence; D000818:Animals; D020224:Expressed Sequence Tags; D015870:Gene Expression; D020869:Gene Expression Profiling; D015723:Gene Library; D006434:Hemocytes / Q000276:immunology*; D008969:Molecular Sequence Data; D017422:Sequence Analysis, DNA; D017386:Sequence Homology, Amino Acid; D013112:Spiders / Q000235:genetics* / Q000276:immunology*