Molecular Cloning, Expression Pattern, and Phylogenetic Analysis of a Selenophosphate synthetase Gene from Antheraea pernyi (Lepidoptera: Saturniidae)

Abstract

Selenophosphate synthetase (Sps), the product of the SelD gene, produces a biologically active selenium donor compound from ATP and selenide. We have isolated and characterized the Sps gene from Antheraea pernyi (Guérin-Méneville) (Lepidoptera: Saturniidae), an economically important insect. The resulting 1601 bp cDNA sequence contains an open reading frame of 1209 bp encoding a polypeptide of 402 amino acids, with 87% sequence identity to that from Drosophila melanogaster (Meigen). Semiquantitative reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (PCR) analysis showed that the Sps gene was transcribed during four developmental stages (egg, larva, pupa, and adult) and in all the tissues tested (blood, fat body, midgut, silk glands, body wall, spermaries and ovaries), suggesting that ApSps plays an important role in the development of A. pernyi. From a database search, Sps protein homologs were found in prokaryotes and eukaryotes, including bacteria, fungi, invertebrates and vertebrates, with 47–98% amino acid sequence identities between eukaryotes, suggesting that they were highly conserved during the evolution of eukaryotes. Phylogenetic analysis, based on Sps protein homolog sequences, clearly separated the known bacterial, fungal, invertebrate and vertebrate Sps proteins, consistent with the topology tree of classical systematics, suggesting the potential value of the Sps protein sequence in phylogenetic inference.

Molecular cloning and expression analysis of a myosin light chain 1 (MLC‐1) gene from Indian meal moth Plodia interpunctella (Lepidoptera: Pyralidae)

“…) and selenophosphate synthetase (Sun et al . ) have been reported as a new molecular tool for phylogenetic inference. A total of 22 eukaryote organisms representative of MLC‐1 sequences from NCBI were used to construct a phylogenetic tree by the maximum likelihood method (Fig.…”

“…Recently, many nuclear protein-coding genes, because they evolved more slowly, are less prone to base-composition bias than mitochondrial markers and typically present fewer alignment issues than ribosomal genes, have been used to reconstruct the phylogenetic relationships in eukaryotes (Wiegmann et al 2000;Lin & Danforth 2004;Danforth et al 2006). Several housekeeping genes have been reported and proposed for phylogenetic inference; for example, myosin heavy chain type II genes (Ruiz-Trillo et al 2002), ribosomal proteins (Shang et al 2005;Hou et al 2008), enolase (Regier et al 2009), lysophospholipase (Liu et al 2010b) and selenophosphate synthetase (Sun et al 2011) have been reported as a new molecular tool for phylogenetic inference. A total of 22 eukaryote organisms representative of MLC-1 sequences from NCBI were used to construct a phylogenetic tree by the maximum likelihood method (Fig.…”

Molecular Characterization and Phylogenetic Analysis of the Eukaryotic Translation Initiation Factor 4A Gene in Antheraea pernyi (Lipdoptera: Saturniidae)

“…2010b ), topoisomerase and arginine kinase ( Wild and Maddison 2008 ), will die slowly ( Li et al. 2010 ), selenophosphate synthetase ( Sun et al. 2011 ), lysyl-tRNA synthetase ( Liu and Qin, 2011 ), and doba decarboxylase ( Regier et al.…”

“…2010b , Li et al. 2010 , Liu and Qin 2011 , Sun et al 2011 ). The eIF-4A gene has been isolated from various kinds of eukaryotes organisms.…”