De novo assembly of a transcriptome for the cricket Gryllus bimaculatus prothoracic ganglion: An invertebrate model for investigating adult central nervous system compensatory plasticity

The auditory system of the cricket, Gryllus bimaculatus, demonstrates an unusual amount of anatomical plasticity in response to injury, even in adults. Unilateral removal of the ear causes deafferented auditory neurons in the prothoracic ganglion to sprout dendrites across the midline, a boundary they typically respect, and become synaptically connected to the auditory afferents of the contralateral ear. The molecular basis of this sprouting and novel synaptogenesis in the adult is not understood. We hypothesize that well-conserved developmental guidance cues may recapitulate their guidance functions in the adult in order to facilitate this compensatory growth. As a first step in testing this hypothesis, we have generated a de novo assembly of a prothoracic ganglion transcriptome derived from control and deafferented adult individuals. We have mined this transcriptome for orthologues of guidance molecules from four well-conserved signaling families: Slit, Netrin, Ephrin, and Semaphorin. Here we report that transcripts encoding putative orthologues of most of the candidate developmental ligands and receptors from these signaling families were present in the assembly, indicating expression in the adult G. bimaculatus prothoracic ganglion.