Proteomics approach to study neuronal regeneration events of the sequenced sea star Patiria miniata

Abstract

Sea stars have long been recognized for their ability to fully regenerate injured tissues as a consequence of predation or amputation. Indeed the ability to regenerate the nervous system is maintained throughout the lifespan of the animal. Since sea stars are distantly related to the chordates, their neuronal regeneration is of potential interest to biomedical applications in regenerative medicine [1-3]. With the advent of sea star (Patiria miniata) genome sequence and gene models we can now effectively study protein expression in sea star neurons using high-resolution mass spectrometry. Previously, the sparse information on sea star protein sequences limited peptide identification to ca. 15%. This bottleneck was overcome with alignment of peptides to P. miniata genomic sequences. At present, we have over 18,000 peptides identified at identification rates of 60%, results commonly observed in sequenced proteomes. The methods we are developing allow greater sensitivity and unprecedented identification of low abundance proteins in the starfish nervous system This level of sensitivity is crucially important for the study for neuronal regeneration events: Sonic hedgehog protein, Neuromodulin and Piwi-like protein 1 [4] are among the identified proteins and clearly highlight P. miniata as a promising model to understand protein regulation during neuronal regeneration.

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