Folate-Mediated One-Carbon Metabolism in the Crustacean Copepod Calanus finmarchicus : Identification of Transcripts and Relative Expression across Development

• Published in: Journal of Marine Science and Engineering
• Main Authors: Daniela Ascione, Ylenia Carotenuto, Chiara Lauritano, Vittoria Roncalli
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2024
• Subjects: zooplankton; RNA-Seq; transcriptomic; in silico mining; developmental expression; folate cycle; Naval architecture. Shipbuilding. Marine engineering; VM1-989; Oceanography; GC1-1581; Calanus finmarchicus; North Atlantic
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.3390/jmse12050786; https://doaj.org/article/2f4fe1070f3844c3a1149c756639867d

Folate, also known as vitamin B9, plays a crucial role in the one-carbon (1C) metabolism, a conserved pathway from microbes to humans. The 1C metabolism, consisting of the folate and methionine cycles, is essential in many biological processes such as nucleotide and protein biosynthesis, cell proliferation, and embryonic development. Despite its functional role, little is known about the 1C metabolism in crustaceans. As part of an ongoing effort to characterize important pathways in Calanus finmarchicus , the biomass-dominant zooplankton in much of the North Atlantic Ocean, we identified transcripts encoding the 1C metabolism enzymes. Using an in silico workflow consisting of a transcriptome mining, reciprocal blasts, and structural analyses of the deduced proteins, we identified the entire set of enzymes in both cycles. The majority encoded for full-length proteins and clustered with homologs from other species. Stage-specific expression was reported, with several transcripts showing high expression in the naupliar stage (e.g., 10-FTHFD, SHMT2) while some methyltransferases (e.g., BHMT, SHMT, DNMT) were more expressed in adults. Overall, this study provides a set of genes which can be used as potential biomarkers of development and reproduction and can be tested in other zooplankters to assess ocean health status monitoring.