Dataset Information

A comprehensive analysis of gene expression changes provoked by bacterial and fungal infection in C. elegans.

ABSTRACT: While Caenorhabditis elegans specifically responds to infection by the up-regulation of certain genes, distinct pathogens trigger the expression of a common set of genes. We applied new methods to conduct a comprehensive and comparative study of the transcriptional response of C. elegans to bacterial and fungal infection. Using tiling arrays and/or RNA-sequencing, we have characterized the genome-wide transcriptional changes that underlie the host's response to infection by three bacterial (Serratia marcescens, Enterococcus faecalis and otorhabdus luminescens) and two fungal pathogens (Drechmeria coniospora and Harposporium sp.). We developed a flexible tool, the WormBase Converter (available at http://wormbasemanager.sourceforge.net/), to allow cross-study comparisons. The new data sets provided more extensive lists of differentially regulated genes than previous studies. Annotation analysis confirmed that genes commonly up-regulated by bacterial infections are related to stress responses. We found substantial overlaps between the genes regulated upon intestinal infection by the bacterial pathogens and Harposporium, and between those regulated by Harposporium and D. coniospora, which infects the epidermis. Among the fungus-regulated genes, there was a significant bias towards genes that are evolving rapidly and potentially encode small proteins. The results obtained using new methods reveal that the response to infection in C. elegans is determined by the nature of the pathogen, the site of infection and the physiological imbalance provoked by infection. They form the basis for future functional dissection of innate immune signaling. Finally, we also propose alternative methods to identify differentially regulated genes that take into account the greater variability in lowly expressed genes.

SUBMITTER: Engelmann I

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3094335 | biostudies-literature | 2011

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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A comprehensive analysis of gene expression changes provoked by bacterial and fungal infection in C. elegans.

Engelmann Ilka I Griffon Aurélien A Tichit Laurent L Montañana-Sanchis Frédéric F Wang Guilin G Reinke Valerie V Waterston Robert H RH Hillier LaDeana W LW Ewbank Jonathan J JJ

PloS one 20110513 5

While Caenorhabditis elegans specifically responds to infection by the up-regulation of certain genes, distinct pathogens trigger the expression of a common set of genes. We applied new methods to conduct a comprehensive and comparative study of the transcriptional response of C. elegans to bacterial and fungal infection. Using tiling arrays and/or RNA-sequencing, we have characterized the genome-wide transcriptional changes that underlie the host's response to infection by three bacterial (Serr ...[more]

PMID: 21602919

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Project description:Microorganisms produce a wide range of natural products (NPs) with clinically and agriculturally relevant biological activities. In bacteria and fungi, genes encoding successive steps in a biosynthetic pathway tend to be clustered on the chromosome as biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs). Historically, "activity-guided" approaches to NP discovery have focused on bioactivity screening of NPs produced by culturable microbes. In contrast, recent "genome mining" approaches first identify candidate BGCs, express these biosynthetic genes using synthetic biology methods, and finally test for the production of NPs. Fungal genome mining efforts and the exploration of novel sequence and NP space are limited, however, by the lack of a comprehensive catalog of BGCs encoding experimentally-validated products. In this study, we generated a comprehensive reference set of fungal NPs whose biosynthetic gene clusters are described in the published literature. To generate this dataset, we first identified NCBI records that included both a peer-reviewed article and an associated nucleotide record. We filtered these records by text and homology criteria to identify putative NP-related articles and BGCs. Next, we manually curated the resulting articles, chemical structures, and protein sequences. The resulting catalog contains 197 unique NP compounds covering several major classes of fungal NPs, including polyketides, non-ribosomal peptides, terpenoids, and alkaloids. The distribution of articles published per compound shows a bias toward the study of certain popular compounds, such as the aflatoxins. Phylogenetic analysis of biosynthetic genes suggests that much chemical and enzymatic diversity remains to be discovered in fungi. Our catalog was incorporated into the recently launched Minimum Information about Biosynthetic Gene cluster (MIBiG) repository to create the largest known set of fungal BGCs and associated NPs, a resource that we anticipate will guide future genome mining and synthetic biology efforts toward discovering novel fungal enzymes and metabolites.

Dataset Information

A comprehensive analysis of gene expression changes provoked by bacterial and fungal infection in C. elegans.

Publications

A comprehensive analysis of gene expression changes provoked by bacterial and fungal infection in C. elegans.

Similar Datasets

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