Whole Transcriptome Analysis Using Next-Generation Sequencing of Sterile-Cultured Eisenia andrei for Immune System Research

Recently, earthworms have become a useful model for research into the immune system, and it is expected that results obtained using this model will shed light on the sophisticated vertebrate immune system and the evolution of the immune response, and additionally help identify new biomolecules with therapeutic applications. However, for earthworms to be used as a genetic model of the invertebrate immune system, basic molecular and genetic resources, such as an expressed sequence tag (EST) database, must be developed for this organism. Next-generation sequencing technologies have generated EST libraries by RNA-seq in many model species. In this study, we used Illumina RNA-sequence technology to perform a comprehensive transcriptome analysis using an RNA sample pooled from sterile-cultured Eisenia andrei. All clean reads were assembled de novo into 41,423 unigenes using the Trinity program. Using this transcriptome data, we performed BLAST analysis against the GenBank non-redundant (NR) database and obtained a total of 12,285 significant BLAST hits. Furthermore, gene ontology (GO) analysis assigned 78 unigenes to 24 immune class GO terms. In addition, we detected a unigene with high similarity to beta-1,3-glucuronyltransferase 1 (GlcAT-P), which mediates a glucuronyl transfer reaction during the biosynthesis of the carbohydrate epitope HNK-1 (human natural killer-1, also known as CD57), a marker of NK cells. The identified transcripts will be used to facilitate future research into the immune system using E. andrei.