Dataset Information

Year-round reproduction and induced spawning of Chinese amphioxus, Branchiostoma belcheri, in laboratory.

ABSTRACT: Amphioxus is a best candidate for studying the evolutionary and developmental mechanisms of vertebrates, because of its vertebrate-like but much simpler morphology, embryonic development and genome structure. Producing live amphioxus embryos throughout the year is an ideal for comparative evolution and developmental studies. However, all amphioxus species have distinct breeding seasons in the wild and laboratory. We recently found that Chinese amphioxus B. belcheri could reproduce repeatedly beyond its natural breeding season when reared under proper conditions. In this study, we were able to extend further and produce embryos throughout the year from October 2011 to October 2012. We found all examined animals had spawned repeatedly during the examined period. In addition, both lancelets B. belcheri and B. japonicum could be induced to spawn by heat-shock method, although the induced spawning efficiency was not as high as that observed in the European lancelet. In general, we have succeeded in producing B. belcheri embryos almost daily throughout the year. This advancement will provide essential embryonic material for evolutionary and developmental studies, and have great implications for the cultivation and spawning induction of other amphioxus species.

SUBMITTER: Li G

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3784433 | biostudies-literature | 2013

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Publications

Year-round reproduction and induced spawning of Chinese amphioxus, Branchiostoma belcheri, in laboratory.

Li Guang G Shu ZongHuang Z Wang Yiquan Y

PloS one 20130926 9

Amphioxus is a best candidate for studying the evolutionary and developmental mechanisms of vertebrates, because of its vertebrate-like but much simpler morphology, embryonic development and genome structure. Producing live amphioxus embryos throughout the year is an ideal for comparative evolution and developmental studies. However, all amphioxus species have distinct breeding seasons in the wild and laboratory. We recently found that Chinese amphioxus B. belcheri could reproduce repeatedly bey ...[more]

PMID: 24086537

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Project description:Global climatic fluctuations governed the ancestral demographic histories of species and contributed to place the current population status into a more extensive ecological and evolutionary context. Genetic variations will leave unambiguous signatures in the patterns of intraspecific genetic variation in extant species since the genome of each individual is an imperfect mosaic of the ancestral genomes. Here, we report the genome sequences of 20 Branchiostoma individuals by whole-genome resequencing strategy. We detected over 140 million genomic variations for each Branchiostoma individual. In particular, we applied the pairwise sequentially Markovian coalescent (PSMC) method to estimate the trajectories of changes in the effective population size (N e) of Branchiostoma population during the Pleistocene. We evaluated the threshold of sequencing depth for proper inference of demographic histories using PSMC was ≥25×. The PSMC results highlight the role of historical global climatic fluctuations in the long-term population dynamics of Branchiostoma. The inferred ancestral N e of the Branchiostoma belcheri populations from Zhanjiang and Xiamen (China) seawaters was different in amplitude before the first (mutation rate = 3 × 10-9) or third glaciation (mutation rate = 9 × 10-9) of the Pleistocene, indicating that the two populations most probably started to evolve in isolation in their respective seas after the first or third glaciation of the Pleistocene. A pronounced population bottleneck coinciding with the last glacial maximum was observed in all Branchiostoma individuals, followed by a population expansion occurred during the late Pleistocene. Species that have experienced long-term declines may be especially vulnerable to recent anthropogenic activities. Recently, the industrial pollution and the exploitation of sea sand have destroyed the harmonious living environment of amphioxus species. In the future, we need to protect the habitat of Branchiostoma and make full use of these detected genetic variations to facilitate the functional study of Branchiostoma for adaptation to local environments.

Project description:As the extant representatives of the basal chordate lineage, amphioxi (including the genera Branchiostoma, Asymmetron and Epigonichthys) play important roles in tracing the state of chordate ancestry. Previous studies have reported that members of the Branchiostoma species have similar morphological phenotypic characteristics, but in contrast, there are high levels of genetic polymorphisms in the populations. Here, we resequenced 20 Branchiostomabelcheri genomes to an average depth of approximately 12.5X using the Illumina HiSeq 2000 platform. In this study, over 52 million variations (~12% of the total genome) were detected in the B. belcheri population, and an average of 12.8 million variations (~3% of the total genome) were detected in each individual, confirming that Branchiostoma is one of the most genetically diverse species sequenced to date. Demographic inference analysis highlighted the role of historical global temperature in the long-term population dynamics of Branchiostoma, and revealed a population expansion at the Greenlandian stage of the current geological epoch. We detected 594 Single nucleotide polymorphism and 148 Indels in the Branchiostoma mitochondrial genome, and further analyzed their genetic mutations. A recent study found that the epithelial cells of the digestive tract in Branchiostoma can directly phagocytize food particles and convert them into absorbable nontoxic nutrients using powerful digestive and immune gene groups. In this study, we predicted all potential mutations in intracellular digestion-associated genes. The results showed that most "probably damaging" mutations were related to rare variants (MAF<0.05) involved in strengthening or weakening the intracellular digestive capacity of Branchiostoma. Due to the extremely high number of polymorphisms in the Branchiostoma genome, our analysis with a depth of approximately 12.5X can only be considered a preliminary analysis. However, the novel variant dataset provided here is a valuable resource for further investigation of phagocytic intracellular digestion in Branchiostoma and determination of the phenotypic and genotypic features of Branchiostoma.

Dataset Information

Year-round reproduction and induced spawning of Chinese amphioxus, Branchiostoma belcheri, in laboratory.

Publications

Year-round reproduction and induced spawning of Chinese amphioxus, Branchiostoma belcheri, in laboratory.

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