Comparative analysis of pre- and post-parasitic transcriptomes and mining pioneer effectors of Heterodera avenae. Issue 1 (December 2017) - Yang, Dan
Abstract Background The cereal cyst nematode (CCN, Heterodera avenae ) is a devastating pathogen of wheat and barley crops in many countries. We aimed to prioritize genetic and molecular targets forH. avenae control via the powerful and integrative bioinformatics platform. Results Here, we sequenced mRNA isolated from ChineseH. avenae at pre-parasitic (consisting of egg, J1 and hatched-J2) stages and post-parasitic (consisting of parasitic-J2, J3, J4 and adults) stages. Total 1, 066, 719 reads of whole life cycle transcriptomes were assembled into 10, 811 contigs with N50 length of 1754 bp and 71, 401 singletons. Comparative analyses of orthologous amongH. avenae and 7 other nematodes with various life-styles revealed the significance and peculiarity of neurological system for sedentary phytonematode. KEGG pathway enrichment demonstrated active crosstalk events of nervous system at pre-parasitic stages, and 6 FMRFamide-like neuropeptides were verified to display an expression peak at the hatched-J2 stage inH. avenae . Furthermore, multiple approaches were undertaken to mine putative effectors and parasitism-specific genes. Notably, H. avenae might represent the first phytonematode reported to possess the pioneer effectors with RxLR motif and potential effectors with homologies toAnt -5/Ant -34 . Conclusion Our work provides valuable resources for in-depth understanding the parasitism and pathogenicity ofH. avenae, as well as developing new targets-oriented strategies on effective managements.