Profound effect of a small cysteine-free protein (pspA) on genomic expression of Beauveria bassiana

Purpose: This transcriptomic analysis aims at unveiling all possible genes orchestrated by pspA, which is evidently required for insect pathogenicity and virulence-related cellular events of Beauveria bassiana. Methods: Total RNAs were extracted from three 3-day-old hyphal cultures (replicates) of pspA disruption and wild-type strains grown under normal culture conditionsand and subjected to deep sequencing on Illumina NovaseqTM 6000 platform. The sequence reads that passed quality filters were mapped to the genome of Beauveria bassiana. All genes differentially expressed in the disruptant versus the wild-type strain were enriched to GO function classes and KEGG pathways. Results: The resultant transcriptome comprises 10430 genes annotated or not annotated. Among those, 1818 genes (genomic 17.54%) were dysregulated in the absence of pspA, including 806 down-regulated and 1012 up-regulated. Conclusions: pspA lacking any predictable function domain has profound impact on the genomic expression of Beauveria bassiana. Overall design: RNA profiles from 3-day-old hyphal cultures of pspA disruption and wild-type strains.