Transcriptomic characterization of the immunogenetic repertoires of heteromyid rodents.

Background: When populations evolve under disparate environmental conditions, they experience different selective pressures that shape patterns of sequence evolution and gene expression. These may be manifested in genetic and phenotypic differences such as a diverse immunogenetic repertoire in species from tropical latitudes that have greater and/or different parasite burdens than more temperate species. To test this idea, we compared the transcriptomes of one tropical species (Heteromys desmarestianus) and two species from temperate latitudes (Dipodomys spectabilis and Chaetodipus baileyi) from the Heteromyidae. We did so in a search for positive selection on sequences and/or differential expression, while controlling for phylogenetic history in our choice of species.
Results: We identified 127,812 contigs and annotated 34,878 of these, identifying immune genes associated with interleukins, cytokines, and the production of mast cells. We identified 632 genes that were upregulated in H. desmarestianus (8.7% of genes tested) and 492 (6.7%) that were downregulated. Gene ontology terms including "immune response" were associated with 31 (4.9%) of the 632 upregulated genes. We found preliminary evidence for positive selection on three genes (Palmitoyltransferase ZDHHC5 Ubiquitin-conjugating enzyme E2 N, Krueppel-like factor 10, and Spindle and kinetochore-associated protein 1) along the H. desmarestianus lineage.
Conclusions: Overall our findings pinpoint genes in species from disparate environments that are on different evolutionary trajectories in terms of expression levels and/or nucleotide sequence. Our data indicate there are significant differences in the expression of genes among the spleen transcriptomes of these species and that a number of these differentially expressed genes do not show the same pattern of differential expression in another tissue type. This points to the possibility of expression differences between these species specific to the spleen transcriptome.