Meeting Abstract
Crustaceans have long played important roles in increasing our understanding of neuropeptidergic signaling. For example, the first invertebrate neuropeptide to be isolated and fully characterized was from a crustacean, and the process of neurosecretion was first formally demonstrated using a crustacean neuroendocrine organ. Moreover, the cardiac and stomatogastric nervous systems of decapods have provided many key insights into peptidergic co-transmission and neuromodulation. Given these and other important scientific contribution, it is surprising that, until recently, little work had focused on crustaceans in terms of genomic and transcriptomic analyses, including investigations directed at elucidating their peptidergic signaling systems. In my presentation, I will describe the workflows that my lab has developed to identify neuropeptide precursor- and receptor-encoding transcripts from the transcriptomes of wide array of crustacean species, as well as the strategy that we have used to predict neuropeptidomes from these data. Recent analyses of a neural transcriptome from the American lobster, Homarus americanus, will serve as one example of the power of in silico transcriptome mining for identifying and characterizing native peptidergic systems in crustaceans. For this species, the structures of nearly 200 distinct neuropeptides and several dozen receptors were predicted using high-throughput nucleotide sequence data. This strategy for peptide prediction has allowed for the identification of many new crustacean peptide families, and the in silico discovery of a diverse set of peptide receptors has provided important insights into physiological control in these animals.
