Gene Expression Analysis Of Central Nervous System And Immune System Of Locust Migratory

The locust nervous system and immune system play essential roles in insectphysiology. The nervous system controls the metamorphosis, growth, reproduction,metabolism and behaviors of insect directly. In immune system, the physiological andpathological processes towards the defense of pathogens are distinguished differentfrom the vertebrates. So the study of locust nervous system and immune system is notonly getting a significant academic sense for understanding of insect physiological, butalso helpful for the explanation of the interaction of host defense and pathogens. At themeanwhile, the pests including locust has developed robust immune defense system tolimit the lethal effect of biological pesticide. The study of insect pathogen defenseprocesses may help to optimize the strategy of pest killing.The locust is lack of the gene information of nervous system and immune system,especially no dataset of differentially expressed genes during the defense of pathogenhas been built, which seriously hampered the molecular researches of locust nervoussystem, immune system and their related physiological and pathological processes. So itis essential to build the nervous system specific gene library and defense processdifferentially expressed gene library.In this study, the deep sequencing and transcriptome analysis technology has beenapplied to generate the nervous system specific genes from locust central nervoussystem and defense differentially expressed genes from locust immune system.The main results were as follows:1. The representative transcriptome database of locust nervous system has beenestablished.41,179Unigenes were obtained with an average length of570bp, and5,519Unigenes were longer than1,000bp. A total of15,895(38.6%) Unigenes wereidentified, including644nervous system relevant Unigenes.2. The differentially expressed genes during locust defense Metarhizium acridumwere identified. After Metarhizium acridum challenge,10,119Unigenes wereup-regulated and4,455Unigenes were down-regulated in fatbody, while2,039Unigenes were up-regulated and2,784Unigenes were down-regulated in hemocyte.3. Among the differentially expressed genes, a common set of infection-responsivegenes were highly differentially regulated, including genes encoding transcriptionfactors, signal transduction proteins, cytokines, proteins involved in apoptosis, proteins with anti-microbial activities, as well as many known or novel proteins not previouslylinked to the immune response.4. Some of the nervous system related genes including voltagate-gated channelproteins and neurotransmitter receptors were found significantly differentially expressedduring infection. The results demonstrated that both the immune system and the nervoussystem took important parts in defense of fungal infection.