purpuratus is the only echinoderm to date that has undergone whole genome sequencing and the paucity of

ophiuroid genes in GenBank. Of the contigs that showed a blastx match to the NCBI non-redundant database, 80% subsequently had Gene Ontology (GO) terms associated with this putative annotation. Of most interest were the 292 GO biological process annotations associated with developmental processes and a further 79 for cell proliferation ( Fig. 1). The transcripts associated with Dabrafenib in vivo these GO terms were subjected to further analysis and revealed a number of genes with a putative involvement in regeneration, not only in ophiuroids, but also in other species. Gene expression during regeneration in ophiuroids has only recently been taken from single gene studies to more transcriptome based investigations with the development of a microarray to study the regenerative process in Amphiura filiformis ( Burns et al., 2011 and Burns et al., 2012). Direct comparison of the A. filiformis dataset with that of O. victoriae presented here was limited by the difference in technologies and approaches: direct pyrosequencing of

mRNA verses sequencing Selleck R428 of a restricted sub-set of up-regulated clones on a microarray. There is also estimated to be considerable evolutionary distance between O. victoriae and A. filiformis of approximately 200 million years ( Smith et al., 1995) which may have resulted in considerable sequence divergence. A blastn comparison using an e− 10 cut off of the 873 EST singleton and contig sequences from A. filiformis with the dataset presented here resulted in a total of 593 matches with 353 O. victoriae contigs matching 157 (18%) A. filiformis EST’s. Of the 157 A. filiformis sequences Idoxuridine available on NCBI EST repository (from Burns et al., 2011 and Burns et al., 2012) that showed blast sequence similarity to O. victoriae, 111 have been previously shown to be differentially expressed during regeneration in A. filiformis ( Burns et al., 2011). Most of the genes in common were structural

(actin, myosin, tubulin), ribosomal or energetic and therefore could be expected to play a role in the process of regeneration. However, two of the common O. victoriae transcripts had been previously identified as having a potentially significant function during arm regeneration in A. filiformis. Both Ov_Contig_396 and the A. filiformis contig Af_Contig_50 demonstrated sequence similarity to the high mobility group domain containing protein HMGB1. Similarly Ov_Contig_1496 and Af_127P7 both showed high sequence similarity to the SOX1 protein. Both the putative HMGB1 and SOX1 transcripts were significantly up-regulated during the early stages of regeneration in A. filiformis during which undifferentiated cells predominated, with expression being reduced during the later stages when most cells were terminally differentiated ( Burns et al., 2011).