Transcript profiling of the meiotic drive phenotype in testis of Aedes aegypti using suppressive subtractive hybridization
Transcript profiling of the meiotic drive phenotype in testis of Aedes aegypti using suppressive subtractive hybridization
Tags: Gene drive mechanisms, Other arthropodsShin, DYJ, L. Z.; Lobo, N. F.; Severson, D. W., Journal of Insect Physiology, 57:1220-1226. 2011.
The meiotic drive gene in Aedes aegypti is tightly linked with the sex determination locus on chromosome 1, and causes highly male-biased sex ratios. We prepared cDNA libraries from testes from the Ae. aegypti 137 strain (driving) and RED strain (non-driving), and used suppressive subtraction hybridization techniques to enrich for 137 testes-specific transcripts. Expressed sequence tags (ESTs) were obtained from a total of 2784 randomly selected clones from the subtracted 137 (subT37) library as well as the primary libraries for each strain (pT37 and pRED). Sequence analysis identified a total of 171 unique genes in the subT37 library and 299 unique genes among the three libraries. The majority of genes enriched in the subT37 library were associated with signal transduction, development, reproduction, metabolic process and cell cycle functions. Further, as observed with meiotic drive systems in Drosophila and mouse, a number of these genes were associated with signaling cascades that involve the Ras superfamily of regulatory small GTPases. Differential expression of several of these genes was verified in Ae. aegypti pupal testes using qRT-PCR. This study increases our understanding of testes gene expression enriched in adult males from the meiotic drive strain as well as insights into the basic testes transcriptome in Ae. aegypti. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
