Project description:We report Illumina-generated RNASeq data of several populations of Tribolium castaneum larvae selected for higher or lower immune priming specificity as well as unselected control populations. From each of these populations, we injected groups of 20 larvae with either one of three bacteria species or left them untreated as controls. Whole body samples were taken 6h after injection and used for RNASeq Analysis.
Project description:Neuropeptides and neurohormones are among the more diverse and functionally important classes of cell-to-cell signaling molecules involved in animal development and behavior. Less is known about the hormones and neuropeptides of the red flour beetle, Tribolium castaneum, than many other insects. However, the genomic information becoming available from this organism presents an opportunity to identify multiple neuropeptide and hormone genes, and hence their associated protein precursors. Using similarity-based prediction, we report new neuropeptides and hormone precursors from T. castaneum, bringing the number of annotated precursors to 37. We identified one prohormone (SVDPIDGDLIG-containing) having little similarity to other insect prohormones. The conversion of the protein precursors into bioactive peptides requires a suite of processing enzymes and a number of enzymatic steps; using the web-based NeuroPred application and similarity-based bioinformatics approaches, we predict 132 likely peptides that may result from the enzymatic processing of these gene products.
