Abstract
Ammonia is one of the major aquatic environmental pollutants that can bring detrimental effects to the growth and survival of aquatic organisms. However, the molecular mechanisms of ammonia toxicity and ammonia excretion in marine invertebrates especially mollusks are still poorly understood. Cephalopods are exclusively ammonotelic with high protein metabolism and ammonia excretion rate, making this taxonomic group an ideal specimen to explore the ammonia detoxification mechanism. In this study, comparative transcriptomes were employed to investigate the transcriptional changes of O. minor in responses to acute ammonia exposure. A total of 63,237 unigenes with an average length of 811 bp were discovered and 25,708 unigenes were successfully annotated. The transcription of 1845 genes were significantly changed after ammonia stress, including 315 up-regulated genes and 1530 down-regulated genes. Gene Ontology (GO) and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) enrichment analysis based on differentially expressed genes (DEGs) revealed that 44 GO terms and 55 KEGG pathways were over-represented. Notably, a large number of genes involved in immune defense, citric acid (TCA) cycle, oxidative phosphorylation and amino acid metabolisms were significantly down-regulated, indicating the decelerated energy production and amino acid rate in response to acute ammonia stress. These results provide new insights into the potential molecular mechanism of ammonia detoxification on transcriptomic level and will facilitate further mechanism studies on mollusks.
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Acknowledgements
The authors thank Mr. CAI Bing and Mr. CAI Hui from Mashan Fishery Company for their help in supplying O. minor samples and experiment sites. This work was supported by research grants from National Science Foundation of China (No. 31672257) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (No. 201822022).
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R.X. and X.D.Z conceived and designed the study. R.X. collected samples and performed the experimental work and data analysis. R.X. wrote the paper and X.D.Z revised the paper. All the authors read and approved the final paper.
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Xu, R., Zheng, X. Hemocytes transcriptomes reveal metabolism changes and detoxification mechanisms in response to ammonia stress in Octopus minor. Ecotoxicology 29, 1441–1452 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10646-020-02279-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10646-020-02279-0