Annotation of transcription factors, chromatin-associated factors, and basal transcription machinery in the pea aphid, Acyrthosiphon pisum, and development of the ATFdb database, a resource for studies of transcriptional regulation

Abstract

The pea aphid, Acyrthosiphon pisum, is an emerging model system in functional and comparative genomics, in part due to the availability of new genomic approaches and the different sequencing and annotation efforts that the community has dedicated to this important crop pest insect. The pea aphid is also used as a model to study fascinating biological traits of aphids, such as their extensive polyphenisms, their bacteriocyte-confined nutritional symbiosis, or their adaptation to the highly unbalanced diet represented by phloem sap. To get insights into the molecular basis of all these processes, it is important to have an appropriate annotation of transcription factors (TFs), which would enable the reconstruction/inference of gene regulatory networks in aphids. Using the latest version of the A. pisum genome assembly and annotation, which represents the first chromosome-level pea aphid genome, we annotated the complete repertoire of A. pisum TFs and complemented this information by annotating genes encoding chromatin-associated and basal transcription machinery proteins. These annotations were done combining information from the model Drosophila melanogaster, for which we also provide a revisited list of these proteins, and de novo prediction. The comparison between the two model systems allowed the identification of major losses or expansions in each genome, while a deeper analysis was made of ZNF TFs (with certain families expanded in the pea aphid), and the Hox gene cluster (showing reorganization in gene position in the pea aphid compared to D. melanogaster). All annotations are available to the community through the Aphid Transcription Factors database (ATFdb), consolidating the various annotations we generated. ATFdb serves as a valuable resource for gene regulation studies in aphids.