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Major ampullate silk gland transcriptomes and fibre proteomes of the golden orb-weavers, Nephila plumipes and Nephila pilipes (Araneae: Nephilidae).

Alessandra D Whaite | Tianfang Wang | Joanne Macdonald | Scott F Cummins
PloS one | 2018

Natural spider silk is one of the world's toughest proteinaceous materials, yet a truly biomimetic spider silk is elusive even after several decades of intense focus. In this study, Next-Generation Sequencing was utilised to produce transcriptomes of the major ampullate gland of two Australian golden orb-weavers, Nephila plumipes and Nephila pilipes, in order to identify highly expressed predicted proteins that may co-factor in the construction of the final polymer. Furthermore, proteomics was performed by liquid chromatography tandem-mass spectroscopy to analyse the natural solid silk fibre of each species to confirm highly expressed predicted proteins within the silk gland are present in the final silk product. We assembled the silk gland transcriptomes of N. plumipes and N. pilipes into 69,812 and 70,123 contigs, respectively. Gene expression analysis revealed that silk gene sequences were among the most highly expressed and we were able to procure silk sequences from both species in excess of 1,300 amino acids. However, some of the genes with the highest expression values were not able to be identified from our proteomic analysis. Proteome analysis of "reeled" silk fibres of N. plumipes and N. pilipes revealed 29 and 18 proteins, respectively, most of which were identified as silk fibre proteins. This study is the first silk gland specific transcriptome and proteome analysis for these species and will assist in the future development of a biomimetic spider silk.

Pubmed ID: 30332416

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UniProt (tool)

RRID:SCR_002380

Collection of data of protein sequence and functional information. Resource for protein sequence and annotation data. Consortium for preservation of the UniProt databases: UniProt Knowledgebase (UniProtKB), UniProt Reference Clusters (UniRef), and UniProt Archive (UniParc), UniProt Proteomes. Collaboration between European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics and Protein Information Resource. Swiss-Prot is a curated subset of UniProtKB.

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GenBank (tool)

RRID:SCR_002760

NIH genetic sequence database that provides annotated collection of all publicly available DNA sequences for almost 280 000 formally described species (Jan 2014) .These sequences are obtained primarily through submissions from individual laboratories and batch submissions from large-scale sequencing projects, including whole-genome shotgun (WGS) and environmental sampling projects. Most submissions are made using web-based BankIt or standalone Sequin programs, and GenBank staff assigns accession numbers upon data receipt. It is part of International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration and daily data exchange with European Nucleotide Archive (ENA) and DNA Data Bank of Japan (DDBJ) ensures worldwide coverage. GenBank is accessible through NCBI Entrez retrieval system, which integrates data from major DNA and protein sequence databases along with taxonomy, genome, mapping, protein structure and domain information, and biomedical journal literature via PubMed. BLAST provides sequence similarity searches of GenBank and other sequence databases. Complete bimonthly releases and daily updates of GenBank database are available by FTP.

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Blast2GO (tool)

RRID:SCR_005828

An ALL in ONE tool for functional annotation of (novel) sequences and the analysis of annotation data. Blast2GO (B2G) joins in one universal application similarity search based GO annotation and functional analysis. B2G offers the possibility of direct statistical analysis on gene function information and visualization of relevant functional features on a highlighted GO direct acyclic graph (DAG). Furthermore B2G includes various statistics charts summarizing the results obtained at BLASTing, GO-mapping, annotation and enrichment analysis (Fisher''''s Exact Test). All analysis process steps are configurable and data import and export are supported at any stage. The application also accepts pre-existing BLAST or annotation files and takes them to subsequent steps. The tool offers a very suitable platform for high throughput functional genomics research in non-model species. B2G is a species-independent, intuitive and interactive desktop application which allows monitoring and comprehending the whole annotation and analysis process supported by additional features like GO Slim integration, evidence code (EC) consideration, a Batch-Mode or GO-Multilevel-Pies. Platform: Windows compatible, Mac OS X compatible, Linux compatible, Unix compatible

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