38th Annual Meeting of the Society for Invertebrate Pathology

A total of 1246 expressed sequence tags (ESTs) were generated by random sequencing of clones from a cDNA library of the infective juvenile stage of the entomopathogenic nematode, Heterorhabditis bacteriophora. Approximately 453 of the 1072 acceptable ESTs (42%) had significant similarities to the annotated sequences in GenBank but 643 (58%) did not find any significant similarity to existing databases. About 19% of the annotated ESTs belonged to the genetic information processing, 15% to metabolism, and 14% to the environmental information processing, all three important pathways to the functioning of the infective juveniles. Several ESTs were similar to genes that have role in aging (akt-1, pdk-1 & daf-7), stress resistance genes such as superoxide dismutase (sod-4), heat shock genes (hsp-70), eat genes, and signaling proteins like G-protein coupled receptors, regulators of G-protein signaling (rgs), and serine/threonine kinases. ESTs also included sequences with similarities to putative virulence factors, such as protease inhibitors, cysteine proteases (cathepsin-B and –L-like) and serine protease. Another useful match was to an active TcA transposable element, which can prove to be a useful tool in functional genomics of entomopathogenic nematodes.