Comparative selenoproteome analysis reveals a reduced utilization of selenium in parasitic platyhelminthes

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1 College of Life Sciences,College of Optoelectronic Engineering, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China
2 College of Life Sciences, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China
3 Institute for Nutritional Sciences, Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, China
DOI
10.7287/peerj.preprints.61v1
Published
Accepted
Subject Areas
Bioinformatics
Keywords
selenocysteine, parasite, platyhelminthes, selenoprotein, bioinformatics
Copyright
© 2013 Jiang et al.
Licence
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Cite this article
Jiang L, Zhu H, Xu Y, Ni J, Zhang Y, Liu Q. 2013. Comparative selenoproteome analysis reveals a reduced utilization of selenium in parasitic platyhelminthes. PeerJ PrePrints 1:e61v1

Abstract

Background: The selenocysteine(Sec)-containing proteins, selenoproteins, are an important group of proteins present in all three kingdoms of life. Although the selenoproteomes of many organisms have been analyzed, systematic studies on selenoproteins in platyhelminthes are still lacking. Moreover, comparison of selenoproteomes between free-living and parasitic animals is rarely studied. Results: In this study, three representative organisms (Schmidtea mediterranea, Schistosoma japonicum and Taenia solium) were selected for comparative analysis of selenoproteomes in Platyhelminthes. Using a SelGenAmic-based selenoprotein prediction algorithm, a total of 37 selenoprotein genes were identified in these organisms. The size of selenoproteomes and selenoprotein families were found to be associated with different lifestyles: free-living organisms have larger selenoproteome whereas parasitic lifestyle corresponds to reduced selenoproteomes. Five selenoproteins, SelT, Sel15, GPx, SPS2 and TR, were found to be present in all examined platyhelminthes as well as almost all sequenced animals, suggesting their essential role in metazoans. Finally, a new splicing form of SelW that lacked the first exon was found to be present in S. japonicum. Conclusions: Our data provide a first glance into the selenoproteomes of organisms in the phylum Platyhelminthes and may help understand function and evolutionary dynamics of selenium utilization in diversified metazoans.