title: Analysis and comparison of a set of expressed sequence tags of the parthenogenetic water flea Daphnia carinata.
abstract: The water flea Daphnia carinata (D. carinata) reproduces both sexually and parthenogenetically, yet little is known about the genes involved in these processes. To further clarify the reproductive biology of Daphnia and elucidate their unique mechanism of reproductive transformation, we have generated and characterized an expressed sequence tag (EST) data set from D. carinata. A set of 1,495 clusters were generated from sequencing 3,072 randomly chosen clones from a parthenogenetic, juvenile water flea cDNA library. The nucleic acid and deduced amino acid sequences were compared with known GenBank sequences. Functional annotation found that 959 clusters showed significant homology with known genes involved in a broad range of activities, including metabolism, translation, development and reproduction, as well as genes involved in sensing environmental factors. We speculate that genes involved in development and reproduction, along with genes that allow the organism to sense changes in the environment, play important roles in the process of parthenogenetic reproduction and could be markers of the early steps of sexual differentiation. Additionally, 86% of the D. Carinata unique sequences could be stringently mapped to the D. pulex genome, of which 125 mapped to intergenic and intronic regions on the current assembly. Our results provide practical insight into crustacean reproductive biology, in addition to establishing a new animal model for reproductive and developmental biology.
authors.affiliation: Department of Life Science, East China Normal University, Shanghai, People's Republic of China. xuxiaoqian@ecnu.cn
authors.forename: Xiaoqian
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Xu
authors.forename: Shuhui
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Song
authors.forename: Qun
authors.initials: Q
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.forename: Fen
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Qin
authors.forename: Kan
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.forename: Xiaowei
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.forename: Songnian
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Hu
authors.forename: Yunlong
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Zhao
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D003621:Daphnia / Q000196:embryology* / Q000235:genetics*; D004625:Embryo, Nonmammalian / Q000378:metabolism; D004777:Environment; D020224:Expressed Sequence Tags; D005786:Gene Expression Regulation; D015723:Gene Library; D016678:Genome / Q000235:genetics; D008969:Molecular Sequence Data; D010312:Parthenogenesis / Q000235:genetics*; D012098:Reproduction / Q000235:genetics; D012689:Sequence Homology, Nucleic Acid; D014867:Water
chemical_list: D014867:Water