The tarantula Haplopelma hainanum (Ornithoctonus hainana) is a very venomous spider found widely in the hilly areas of Hainan province in southern China. Its venom contains a variety of toxic components with different pharmacological properties. In the present study, we used a venomic strategy for high-throughput identification of tarantula-venom peptides from H. hainanum. This strategy includes three different approaches: (i) transcriptomics, that is, EST-based cloning and PCR-based cloning plus DNA sequencing; (ii) peptidomics, that is, off-line multiple dimensional liquid chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry (MDLC-MS) plus peptide sequencing (direct Edman sequencing and bottom-up mass spectrometric sequencing); (iii) genomics, that is, genomic DNA cloning plus DNA sequencing. About 420 peptide toxins were detected by mass spectrometry, and 272 peptide precursors were deduced from cDNA and genomic DNA sequences. After redundancy removal, 192 mature sequences were identified by three approaches. This is the largest number of peptide toxin sequences identified from a spider species so far. On the basis of precursor sequence identity, peptide toxins from the tarantula H. hainanum venom can be classified into 11 superfamilies (and related families). Our results revealed that gene duplication and focal hypermutation may be responsible for the enormous molecular diversity in spider peptide toxins. The current work is an initial overview for the study of tarantula-venom peptides in parallel transcriptomic, peptidomic, and genomic analyses. It is hoped that this work will also provide an effective guide for high-throughput identification of peptide toxins from other spider species, especially tarantula species.
Dysphania schraderiana is widely distributed in Lhasa (Tibet, China) and used as a traditional medicine. However, the lack of genetic information hinders the understanding of its physiological processes, such as the biosynthesis of secondary metabolites. Herein, we used Illumina Hiseq4000 platform to sequence the transcriptome of flower and leaf tissues from D. schraderiana for the first time. Totally, 40,142 unigenes were assembled from approximately 5.2 million clean reads. All unigenes underwent gene prediction and were subsequently annotated in a NR (NCBI non-redundant protein) database, COG (Clusters of Orthologous Groups of proteins) database, and KEGG (Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes) database. Among the 40,142 unigenes, 2,579 genes were identified as differentially expressed between flowers and leaves, and used in further enrichment analysis. Also, 2,156 unigenes were annotated as transcription factors. Furthermore, our transcriptome analysis resulted in the identification of candidate unigenes annotated to enzymes involved in terpenoid biosynthesis. Taken together, this work has laid the foundation for the investigation of secondary metabolite biosynthesis and other physiological processes of D. schraderiana .
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