Thermonectus marmoratus camera eye transcriptomes

Principal camera eyes from third instar diving beetle larvae were dissected and were divided into two anatomical halves: support cell and retina halves. Transcriptomes were generated for these two halves for three biological replicates.The primary objective of this study was to investigate if the support cells in these eyes have glia-like molecular expression compared to the retina. Furthermore, we also tested the overlap of the identified glial genes with specific eye glia of D.melanogaster compound eye and vertebrate (M. musculus and D. rerio) camera eyes.Together these results indicate that the support cells in arthropod camera eyes indeed are glia like in nature and sets up the stage to ask important questions regarding the evolution of eye glia.