Transcriptome analysis of females and males following knockdown serine/threonine protein phosphatase 1 catalytic subunit encoding genes(Sj-pp1c) in Schistosoma japonicum

Purpose: To obtain the differentially expressed genes based on post-RNAi transcriptional profiling analysis of females and males, which provide a more comprehensive overview about the effects of Sj-pp1c knockdown on schistosoma developmental and reproduction biology at the molecular level. Methods: Schistosoma japonicum females and males were collected from 21 days post infection worm pairs that untreated (Blank,BLA_FE/M) or treated with combined Sj-pp1c dsRNAs (Sj-pp1c KD,PP1_FE/M) cultured for 7 d in vitro. Total mRNA profiles of females and males were generated by deep sequencing, in triplicate, using Illumina HiSeqTM2000. Results: 41-51 million reads (average 44 million) were obtained for each sample after quality filtering, and 63-67% reads were mapped to S. japonicum reference genome(WormBase ParaSite, http://parasite.wormbase.org/ftp.html; version 7.0) and identified 15,314 transcripts by Tophat (version v2.0.12) and Cufflinks (Version 2.1.1.). 2291 and 229 transcripts showed differentially expressed in males and females, respectively,between the untreated and Sj-pp1c dsRNAs treated group, with adjust P value <0.05. GO analysis showed differentially expressed genes are mainly function in extracellular matrix structural constituent, proteolysis and collagen trimer. Conclusions: We performed analysis on transcriptional profiling of females and males following Sj-pp1c-RNAi by RNA-seq, which provided molecular evidence for the pleiotropic roles that Sj-pp1c plays in schistosome biology. Total mRNA profiles of untreated and Sj-pp1c dsRNAs treated female and male Schistosoma japonicum were generated by deep sequencing, in triplicate, using Illumina HiSeqTM2000.