Response of purple sea urchin (Strongylocentrotus purpuratus) immune cells (coelomocytes) to UVB radiation in vitro: timecourse raw bulk-RNA sequencing reads and 6hr raw single-cell RNA sequencing reads.
Sea urchins possess a remarkably complex innate immune system and are noted for their lack of neoplastic disease. This suggests that these animals possess robust cell-intrinsic and/or cell-extrinsic mechanisms to respond to DNA damage, allowing them to maintain genomic integrity and avoid oncogenesis, though these mechanisms are uncharacterized. In this study, we leveraged the immune system of a long-lived, cancer-resistant marine animal model, the purple sea urchin Strongylocentrotus purpuratus, to identify the molecular signaling networks mediating the response to DNA damage. We employed UVB radiation to induce DNA damage in immune cells (coelomocytes) collected from S. purpuratus (n=3 bioreplicates) and performed bulk RNA sequencing over a timecourse of recovery in vitro (0, 1, 3, 6, and 24 hours). Additionally, we performed single-cell transcriptomic analysis at 6 hours recovery to resolve the DNA damage response at the cell-type level.