title: De novo transcriptome of the muga silkworm, Antheraea assamensis (Helfer).
abstract: Antheraea assamensis (Lepidoptera: Saturniidae), is a semi-domesticated silkworm known to be endemic to Assam and the adjoining hilly areas of Northeast India. It is the only producer of a unique, commercially important variety of golden silk called "muga silk". Herein, we report the de novo transcriptome of A. assamensis reared on Machilus bombycina leaves for the first time. Short reads generated by high throughput sequencing of cDNA libraries from multiple tissues, viz. alimentary canal, silk gland and residual body of the 5thinstar of muga silkworm were assembled into transcripts via a de novo assembly pipeline followed by functional annotation and classification. A total of 1,21,433 transcripts were generated from ~231 million raw reads of which ~74% (89,583) were either allocated a functional annotation or categorized under Pfam/COG/KEGG categories. Identification of differentially expressed transcripts and their comparative sequence analysis revealed candidate genes related to silk synthesis, viz. silk gland factor-1 and 3, sericin-like transcript, etc. with conserved forkhead, homeo- and POU domains. Several candidate anti-microbial peptides which may have potential anti-bacterial, anti-fungal or anti-parasitic activity in A. assamensis were also identified. T/A and AT/TA were predicted to be the most abundant mono- and di-nucleotide simple sequence repeat markers in the transcriptome. Transcriptome validation was carried out by quantitative real-time PCR (qPCR) amplification of eight transcripts. The resources generated by this study will expand the periphery of existing genomic data on A. assamensis facilitating future in-depth studies on its unknown aspects.
authors.affiliation: Bioengineering Research Laboratory, Department of Biosciences and Bioengineering, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, Assam 781039, India.
authors.forename: Hasnahana
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Chetia
authors.affiliation: Bioengineering Research Laboratory, Department of Biosciences and Bioengineering, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, Assam 781039, India.
authors.forename: Debajyoti
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Kabiraj
authors.affiliation: Bioengineering Research Laboratory, Department of Biosciences and Bioengineering, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, Assam 781039, India.
authors.forename: Deepika
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Singh
authors.affiliation: Centre for the Environment, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, Assam 781039, India.
authors.forename: Ponnala Vimal
authors.initials: PV
authors.lastname: Mosahari
authors.affiliation: Bioengineering Research Laboratory, Department of Biosciences and Bioengineering, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, Assam 781039, India.
authors.forename: Suradip
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Das
authors.affiliation: Department of Bioengineering and Technology, Gauhati University Institute of Science and Technology (GUIST), Gauhati University, Guwahati 781014, Assam, India.
authors.forename: Pragya
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Sharma
authors.affiliation: Biotechnology Section, Central Muga Eri Research & Training Institute (CMER&TI), Lahdoigarh, 785700 Jorhat, Assam, India.
authors.forename: Kartik
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Neog
authors.affiliation: Bioengineering Research Laboratory, Department of Biosciences and Bioengineering, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, Assam 781039, India.
authors.forename: Swagata
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Sharma
authors.affiliation: Central Silk Board (CSB), Bangalore 506068, Karnataka, India.
authors.forename: P
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Jayaprakash
authors.affiliation: Bioengineering Research Laboratory, Department of Biosciences and Bioengineering, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, Assam 781039, India. Electronic address: ubora@iitg.ernet.in.
authors.forename: Utpal
authors.initials: U
authors.lastname: Bora
mesh_terms: D000595:Amino Acid Sequence; D000818:Animals; D020869:Gene Expression Profiling / Q000379:methods*; D015723:Gene Library; D063990:Gene Ontology; D017344:Genes, Insect / Q000235:genetics; D059014:High-Throughput Nucleotide Sequencing / Q000379:methods; D019476:Insect Proteins / Q000235:genetics; D007814:Larva / Q000235:genetics; D019770:Lauraceae / Q000469:parasitology; D058977:Molecular Sequence Annotation; D009036:Moths / Q000235:genetics*; D018515:Plant Leaves / Q000469:parasitology; D020133:Reverse Transcriptase Polymerase Chain Reaction; D017422:Sequence Analysis, DNA / Q000379:methods; D017386:Sequence Homology, Amino Acid; D047011:Silk / Q000235:genetics*; D059467:Transcriptome
chemical_list: D019476:Insect Proteins; D047011:Silk
keywords: Alimentary canal; Antimicrobial peptide; Lepidoptera; Machilus bombycina; Next generation sequencing; Residual body; Saturniidae; Sericin; Silk gland; Silk gland factor