MiR-277/4989 regulate transcriptional landscape during juvenile to adult transition in the parasitic helminth Schistosoma mansoni.
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Authors
van Dongen, Stijn
Collins, Julie
Quintais, Leonor
Ribeiro, Diogo M
Sessler, Florian
Hunt, Martin
Rinaldi, Gabriel
Collins, James J
Berriman, Matthew
Publication Date
2017-05Journal Title
PLoS Negl Trop Dis
ISSN
1935-2727
Publisher
Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Volume
11
Issue
5
Pages
e0005559
Language
eng
Type
Article
This Version
VoR
Physical Medium
Electronic-eCollection
Metadata
Show full item recordCitation
Protasio, A., van Dongen, S., Collins, J., Quintais, L., Ribeiro, D. M., Sessler, F., Hunt, M., et al. (2017). MiR-277/4989 regulate transcriptional landscape during juvenile to adult transition in the parasitic helminth Schistosoma mansoni.. PLoS Negl Trop Dis, 11 (5), e0005559. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pntd.0005559
Abstract
Schistosomes are parasitic helminths that cause schistosomiasis, a disease affecting circa 200 million people, primarily in underprivileged regions of the world. Schistosoma mansoni is the most experimentally tractable schistosome species due to its ease of propagation in the laboratory and the high quality of its genome assembly and annotation. Although there is growing interest in microRNAs (miRNAs) in trematodes, little is known about the role these molecules play in the context of developmental processes. We use the completely unaware "miRNA-blind" bioinformatics tool Sylamer to analyse the 3'-UTRs of transcripts differentially expressed between the juvenile and adult stages. We show that the miR-277/4989 family target sequence is the only one significantly enriched in the transition from juvenile to adult worms. Further, we describe a novel miRNA, sma-miR-4989 showing that its proximal genomic location to sma-miR-277 suggests that they form a miRNA cluster, and we propose hairpin folds for both miRNAs compatible with the miRNA pathway. In addition, we found that expression of sma-miR-277/4989 miRNAs are up-regulated in adults while their predicted targets are characterised by significant down-regulation in paired adult worms but remain largely undisturbed in immature "virgin" females. Finally, we show that sma-miR-4989 is expressed in tegumental cells located proximal to the oesophagus gland and also distributed throughout the male worms' body. Our results indicate that sma-miR-277/4989 might play a dominant role in post-transcriptional regulation during development of juvenile worms and suggest an important role in the sexual development of female schistosomes.
Keywords
Animals, Mice, Inbred BALB C, Schistosoma mansoni, MicroRNAs, Computational Biology, Transcription, Genetic, Gene Expression Regulation, Female, Male
Identifiers
External DOI: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pntd.0005559
This record's URL: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/270976
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