BackgroundPear (Pyrus spp) is an important fruit species worldwide; however, its genetics and genomic information is limited. Combining the Solexa/Illumina RNA-seq high-throughput sequencing approach (RNA-seq) with Digital Gene Expression (DGE) analysis would be a powerful tool for transcriptomic study. This paper reports the transcriptome profiling analysis of Chinese white pear (P. bretschneideri) using RNA-seq and DGE to better understand the molecular mechanisms in fruit development and maturation of Chinese white pear.ResultsDe novo transcriptome assembly and gene expression analysis of Chinese white pear were performed in an unprecedented depth (5.47 gigabase pairs) using high-throughput Illumina RNA-seq combined with a tag-based Digital Gene Expression (DGE) system. Approximately, 60.77 million reads were sequenced, trimmed, and assembled into 90,227 unigenes. These unigenes comprised 17,619 contigs and 72,608 singletons with an average length of 508 bp and had an N50 of 635 bp. Sequence similarity analyses against six public databases (Uniprot, NR, and COGs at NCBI, Pfam, InterPro, and KEGG) found that 61,636 unigenes can be annotated with gene descriptions, conserved protein domains, or gene ontology terms. By BLASTing all 61,636 unigenes in KEGG, a total of 31,215 unigenes were annotated into 121 known metabolic or signaling pathways in which a few primary, intermediate, and secondary metabolic pathways are directly related to pear fruit quality. DGE libraries were constructed for each of the five fruit developmental stages. Variations in gene expression among all developmental stages of pear fruit were significantly different in a large amount of unigenes.ConclusionExtensive transcriptome and DGE profiling data at five fruit developmental stages of Chinese white pear have been obtained from a deep sequencing, which provides comprehensive gene expression information at the transcriptional level. This could facilitate understanding of the molecular mechanisms in fruit development and maturation. Such a database can also be used as a public information platform for research on molecular biology and functional genomics in pear and other related species.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/1471-2164-14-823) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Chronic hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection (CHB) in children remains a public health challenge despite significant success in programme is established to prevent mother‐to‐child transmission. In particular, CHB in Chinese children are mostly acquired through vertical transmission, which differs from the common infection route reported in other countries and regions. This situation has resulted in a high endemic prevalence of CHB in Chinese adults. Thus, successful treatment of children with CHB will prevent the development of advanced liver diseases in late adulthood. However, there is still no consensus on the clinical guideline to treat paediatric CHB. In this study, we evaluated the potential of interferon alpha (IFNa) treatment for Chinese children with CHB. A total of 41 patients with CHB aged 3‐17 years were enrolled in this retrospective study: 21 patients were treated with pegylated (PEG)‐IFNa and 20 patients without treatment served as the control group. The rates of HBV DNA suppression, hepatitis B e antigen (HBeAg) clearance and hepatitis B surface antigen (HBsAg) clearance were significantly higher in the PEG‐IFNa treatment group than in the control group (P < 0.05 at 48 weeks). Unexpectedly, PEG‐IFNa treatment achieved a high rate of HBsAb production, far exceeding the clinical outcome in documented PEG‐IFNa‐treated CHB adults. Further analysis revealed that younger children (3‐6 years old) were more responsive to PEG‐IFNa treatment with respect to achieving a protective level of HBsAb in a short treatment cycle than adolescents (10‐17 years old). Overall, these results indicate that the immune system of children might have a preserved PEG‐IFNa‐mediated mechanism to completely control HBV, which can help to design new strategies to treat CHB patients.
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