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Proteomics of larval hemolymph in Bombyx mori reveals various nutrient-storage and immunity-related proteins

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Abstract

The silkworm, Bombyx mori, is an important economic insect for its production of silk. The larvae of many lepidopteran insects are major agricultural pests and often silkworm is explored as a model organism for other lepidopteran pest species. The hemolymph of caterpillars contains a lot of nutrient and immune components. In this study, we applied liquid chromatography–tandem mass spectrometry to gain a better understanding of the larval hemolymph proteomics in B. mori. We identified 752 proteins in hemolymph collected from day-4 fourth instar and day-7 fifth instar. Nearly half the identified proteins (49 %) were predicted to function as binding proteins and 46 % were predicted to have catalytic activities. Apolipophorins, storage proteins, and 30K proteins constituted the most abundant groups of nutrient-storage proteins. Of them, 30K proteins showed large differences between fourth instar larvae and fifth instar larvae. Besides nutrient-storage proteins, protease inhibitors are also expressed very highly in hemolymph. The analysis also revealed lots of immunity-related proteins, including recognition, signaling, effectors and other proteins, comprising multiple immunity pathways in hemolymph. Our data provide an exhaustive research of nutrient-storage proteins and immunity-related proteins in larval hemolymph, and will pave the way for future physiological and pathological studies of caterpillars.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Basic Research Program of China (No. 2012CB114600), the National Hi-Tech Research and Development Program of China (No. 2011AA100306), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 31172157, No. 31000563), the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2013M540695), the Chongqing Natural Science Foundation (No. 2010BB5221), and the Science and Technology Innovation Foundation for Graduate Students of Southwest University of China (No. kb2010003). We are grateful to Tara D. Sutherland (CSIRO Ecosystem Sciences, Australia) for her helpful suggestions.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Silkworm Genome Biology, Southwest University, Chongqing, 400716, China

    Yan Zhang, Zhaoming Dong, Dandan Wang, Yong Wu, Qianru Song, Ping Zhao & Qingyou Xia

  2. Thermo Fisher, Shanghai, 201206, China

    Peiming Gu

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  1. Yan Zhang
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Correspondence to Ping Zhao.

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Zhang, Y., Dong, Z., Wang, D. et al. Proteomics of larval hemolymph in Bombyx mori reveals various nutrient-storage and immunity-related proteins. Amino Acids 46, 1021–1031 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00726-014-1665-7

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