Salinity is one of the most important abiotic environmental factors for marine animals. If salinity deviates from optimum, adaptive mechanisms switch on to maintain organism’s physiological activity....

Immune responses of invertebrate animals are mediated through innate mechanisms, among which production of antimicrobial peptides play an important role. Although evolutionary Polychaetes represent an interesting group closely related to a putative common ancestor of other coelomates, their immune mechanisms still remain scarcely investigated. Previously our group has identified arenicins - new antimicrobial peptides of the lugworm Arenicola marina, since then these peptides were thoroughly characterized in terms of their structure and inhibitory potential. In the present study we addressed the question of the physiological functions of arenicins in the lugworm body. Using molecular and immunocytochemical methods we demonstrated that arencins are expressed in the wide range of the lugworm tissues - coelomocytes, body wall, extravasal tissue and the gut. The expression of arenicins is constitutive and does not depend on stimulation of various infectious stimuli. Most intensively arenicins are produced by mature coelomocytes where they function as killing agents inside the phagolysosome. In the gut and the body wall epithelia arenicins are released from producing cells via secretion as they are found both inside the epithelial cells and in the contents of the cuticle. Collectively our study showed that arenicins are found in different body compartments responsible for providing a first line of defence against infections, which implies their important role as key components of both epithelial and systemic branches of host defence.

Amyloids are protein fibrils adopting structure of cross-beta spine exhibiting either pathogenic or functionally significant properties. In prokaryotes, there are several groups of functional amyloids; however, all of them were identified by specialized approaches that do not reveal all cellular amyloids. Here, using our previously developed PSIA (Proteomic Screening and Identification of Amyloids) approach, we have conducted a proteomic screening for candidates for novel amyloid-forming proteins in Escherichia coli as one of the most important model organisms and biotechnological objects. As a result, we identified 61 proteins in fractions resistant to treatment with ionic detergents. We found that a fraction of proteins bearing potentially amyloidogenic regions predicted by bioinformatics algorithms was 3-5-fold more abundant among the identified proteins compared to those observed in the entire E. coli proteome. Almost all identified proteins contained potentially amyloidogenic regions, and four of them (BcsC, MukB, YfbK, and YghJ) have asparagine- and glutamine-rich regions underlying a crucial feature of many known amyloids. In this study, we demonstrate for the first time that at the proteome level there is a correlation between experimentally demonstrated detergent-resistance of proteins and potentially amyloidogenic regions predicted by bioinformatics approaches. The data obtained enable further comprehensive characterization of entirety of amyloids (or amyloidome) in bacterial cells.

Background: The introduction of DNA-based molecular markers made a revolution in biological systematics. However, in cases of very recent divergence events, the neutral divergence may be too slow, and the analysis of adaptive part of the genome is more informative to reconstruct the recent evolutionary history of young species. The advantage of proteomics is its ability to reflect the biochemical machinery of life. It may help both to identify rapidly evolving genes and to interpret their functions.Methods: Here we applied a comparative gel-based proteomic analysis to several species from the gastropod family Littorinidae. Proteomes were clustered to assess differences related to species, geographic location, sex and body part, using data on presence/absence of proteins in samples and data on protein occurrence frequency in samples of different species. Cluster support was assessed using multiscale bootstrap resampling and the stability of clustering—using cluster-wise index of cluster stability. Taxon-specific protein markers were derived using IndVal method. Proteomic trees were compared to consensus phylogenetic tree (based on neutral genetic markers) using estimates of the Robinson–Foulds distance, the Fowlkes–Mallows index and cophenetic correlation.Results: Overall, the DNA-based phylogenetic tree and the proteomic similarity tree had consistent topologies. Further, we observed some interesting deviations of the proteomic littorinid tree from the neutral expectations. (1) There were signs of molecular parallelism in twoLittorariaspecies that phylogenetically are quite distant, but live in similar habitats. (2) Proteome divergence was unexpectedly high between very closely relatedLittorina fabalisandL. obtusata, possibly reflecting their ecology-driven divergence. (3) Conservative house-keeping proteins were usually identified as markers for cryptic species groups (“saxatilis” and “obtusata” groups in theLittorinagenus) and for genera (LittorariaandEchinolittorinaspecies pairs), while metabolic enzymes and stress-related proteins (both potentially adaptively important) were often identified as markers supporting species branches. (4) In all fiveLittorinaspecies British populations were separated from the European mainland populations, possibly reflecting their recent phylogeographic history. Altogether our study shows that proteomic data, when interpreted in the context of DNA-based phylogeny, can bring additional information on the evolutionary history of species.