Identification, Characterization, and Expression of a PRQFVamide-Related Peptide in Cephalopod Sepiella japonica

Abstract

Neuropeptides, as neurotransmitters and neuromodulators, have a variety of physiological functions in the mollusk. Here, a PRQFVamide-related peptide gene was cloned from cuttlefish Sepiella japonica (designated as SjPRQFVRP, GenBank Accession No: OK999997). The full length of SjPRQFVRP is 1748 bp, including an open reading frame (ORF) of 738 bp encoding 245 amino acids. The putative precursor protein comprises one signal peptide and four different mature pentapeptides: fourteen copies of PMEFLamide, three copies of RMEFLamide, one copy of AMEFLamide and GMEFLamide. Multiple alignments showed SjPRQFVRP shared 71% identity with that of Octopus vulgaris and supported the phylogenetic analysis. The spatio-temporal expression pattern showed that SjPRQFVRP mRNA was widely expressed among the 13 tissues and primarily abundantly expressed in the brain and optic lobe during the whole development stage. In situ hybridization data indicated that SjPRQFVRP was detected in the vertical lobe, subvertical lobe, anterior basal lobe, anterior pedal lobe, and optic lobes of the brain. Subcellular localization analysis revealed that the SjPRQFVRP protein was localized in the cytoplasm of HEK293 cells. Collectively, the results will provide a foundation for further exploring the mechanism of SjPRQFVRP function in cephalopods.

The Factors Driving the Spatial Variation in the Selection of Spawning Grounds for Sepiella japonica in Offshore Zhejiang Province, China

“…It is distributed along the coast of Russia in the northwestern Pacific Ocean, from the Kanto area of Honshu Island in Japan to South Korea, the East China Sea and the South China Sea, mainly in the offshore area of Zhejiang, the sea area in eastern Fujian and Guangdong in China, and the sea area west of Japan [5,6]. S. japonica is the most populous and productive cuttlefish along the coast of China, and it was once named one of the four major seafoods in the East China Sea, together with Larimichthys crocea, Larimichthys polyactis, and Trichiurus japonicus [7]. In 1959, the highest annual production of S. japonica in the East China Sea District exceeded 70,000 t. The main distribution areas were in the Zhejiang's offshore area, the seas of eastern Fujian, and the Zhejiang's offshore area, the latter of which had the largest production, accounting for about 80% of the total production of this species of cuttlefish in the offshore areas of China [5,6,8].…”