Abstract
The colonial ascidian Botryllus schlosseri manifests a unique allorecognition system that is controlled by a single histocompatibility haplotype, the Fu/HC locus. When two allogeneic incompatible colonies come into direct contact, they develop inflammatory-like rejection lesions, called points of rejection (POR). While screening for differentially expressed genes during POR formation, we developed and analyzed a cDNA library of expressed sequence tags (ESTs) with 1693 unique ESTs that were clustered and assembled into 217 contigs and 1476 singlets. About 51% of these ESTs showed high similarity (E-value ≤0.005) to known database sequences, of which 123 matches were identified as immune-relevant genes encoding for stress proteins, pattern recognition receptors and complement proteins, proteases and protease inhibitors, cell adhesion and coagulation proteins, cytokine-related proteins, programmed cell death and proteasome-associated proteins. This first EST wide-screening analysis of the Botryllus allorecognition effector arm reveals a complex innate immune system, hallmarked by a whole genome response to allorecognition challenge.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 889-902 |
| Number of pages | 14 |
| Journal | Developmental and Comparative Immunology |
| Volume | 31 |
| Issue number | 9 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 2007 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This study was supported by a grant from the Marine Genomics Europe Network of Excellence (EDD Node), from the United States–Israel Bi-National Science Foundation (2003-010) and partly from the Israel Academy of Science (550-06). We thank V. Caspi from the Bioinformatics Support Unit at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev for dedicated computer work and G. Paz for assistance in manuscript preparation.
Keywords
- Allorecognition
- Botryllus
- Expressed sequence tags
- Immunity
- Subtraction library
- Urochordata
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Immunology
- Developmental Biology