Meeting Abstract
11.6 Friday, Jan. 4 Zero-click, Automatic Assembly, Annotation and Visualization Workflow for Comparative Analysis of Transcriptomes: The quest for novel signaling pathways GIRARDO, D.O.*; CITARELLA, M; KOHN, A.B.; MOROZ, L.L.; Univ of Florida; Univ of Florida; Univ of Florida; Univ of Florida dogirardo@wpi.edu
The rapid growth of genomic datasets is an enormous technical and conceptual challenge in data processing. To address this challenge, we developed an automated “zero-click” analysis pipeline with an integrated signaling peptide prediction system. This pipeline is compatible with all next generation sequencing platforms and it is capable of processing and visualizing RNA seq data in less than a day. This greatly improves the pipeline’s computational throughput, keeping pace with the rapid advances of sequencing technology in recent years. The developed workflow has been validated with 60+ RNA-seq datasets obtained from 10 species of ctenophores (one of the most basal lineages of Metazoa) and 50+ species of molluscs, acoels, arthropods, and basal deuterostomes. All 60+ sequencing projects were designed to select organisms whose unique neural organization, development, cellular structures and behaviors aid in understanding the origins and evolution of nervous systems. As a result, we first identified the most evolutionarily conserved and fastest evolving subsets of genes underlying the origins of neuronal innovations. We hypothesize that secretory peptides can be the earliest intercellular signaling molecules. Consequently, the workflow is designed to simultaneously predict secretory signaling peptides across species. As an illustrated example, we investigated the effectiveness of our peptide prediction system in the quest for enigmatic signaling molecules in ctenophores. Importantly, we also validated our predictions by in situ hybridization to determine localization of the primary secretory cells. Our initial results suggest a diverse set of novel signaling peptides in ctenophores – most of them have no homologies across other phyla.
