Bioinformatic Identification of Nuclear Hormone Receptor DAF-12 in Plant Parasitic Nematode M. Incognita

SCHUSTER, CLAUDIO DAVID; MODENUTTI, CARLOS PABLO

Congreso; XI CAB2C (Congreso Argentino de Bioinformatica y Biologia Computacional); 2021

Asociacion Argentina de Bioinformatica y Biologia Computacional)

The root-knot nematode (RKN) Meloidogyne spp. Is a plant-parasitic nematode responsible for infecting crops and producing losses of billions of dollars a year worldwide. These worms lay eggs on the plant root, and when they hatch they infect the root during the second juvenile stage J2. This J2 developmental stage is one of the most vulnerable, and therefore the best phase to develop a controlling strategy.One of the most attractive candidates is DAF-12, a nuclear receptor present in C. elegans, that binds a family of compounds known as dafachronic acids (DAs). In favorable conditions, the protein DAF-9 is expressed in J2 stage, which completes the synthesis of DAs. DAs bind to DAF-12 and activate developmental genes, allowing the larva to become adult. Although several C. elegans DAF-12 homologues have been identified in genomes of different parasitic nematodes, attempts to identify it in the meloidogyne genus using Blast have not been successful. Given this background, in this study we searched the RKN Meloidogyne Incognita genome for orthologous of DAF-9 and DAF-12 using a strategy that uses Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) to filter the proteome to those proteins containing the necessary domains, and discards any possibility of paralogy by means of a phylogenetic analysis that includes validated sequences of the studied genes from other species. By combining these tools we developed a new strategy to find orthologous genes in genomes that allowed us to identify DAF-9 and DAF-12 in M. incognita.