Project description:Meiotic recombination is carried out through a specialized pathway for the formation and repair of DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs) made by the Spo11 protein. The present study shed light on the functional role of Cyclin, CYC2, in Tetrahymena thermophila which has transcriptionally high expression level during meiosis process. Knocking out the CYC2 gene results in arrest of meiotic conjugation process at 2.5â??3.5 h after conjugation initiation, before the meiosis division starts, and in company with the absence of DSBs. To investigate the underlying mechanism of this phenomenon, a complete transcriptome profile was performed between wild-type strain and CYC2 knock-out strain. Functional analysis of RNA-Seq results identifies related differentially expressed genes (DEGs) including SPO11 and these DEGs are enriched in DNA repair/mismatch repair (MMR) terms in homologous recombination (HR), which indicates that CYC2 could play a crucial role in meiosis by regulating SPO11 and participating in HR. We performed mRNA profiling on both wild-type strains and CYC2-knocking out strains at four different stages during meiosis prohase of Tetrahymena thermophila.
Project description:We present a comprehensive transcriptome of ciliate T. thermophila using the Illumina RNA-seq platform. The data was generated from the six mRNA samples of growth, starvation and conjugation of Tetrahymena. Despite an AT rich genome, there are about 124.6 million reads mapped to T. thermophila genome. Using these mapped reads, we have significantly improved the previous genome annotation and investigated the gene expression. Besides, our result also provided a comprehensive understanding of the alternative splicing in T. thermophila, and suggested the existence of the regulated unproductive splicing and translation (RUST) in the single-celled eukaryote. RNA-seq for six samples of Tetrahymena growth, starvation and conjugation.
