Identification of immune-relevant genes in histoincompatible rejecting colonies of the tunicate Botryllus schlosseri

The colonial ascidian Botryllus schlosseri manifests a unique allorecognition system that is controlled by a single histocompatibility haplotype, the Fu/HC locus. When two allogeneic incompatible colonies come into direct contact, they develop inflammatory-like rejection lesions, called points of rejection (POR). While screening for differentially expressed genes during POR formation, we developed and analyzed a cDNA library of expressed sequence tags (ESTs) with 1693 unique ESTs that were clustered and assembled into 217 contigs and 1476 singlets. About 51% of these ESTs showed high similarity (E-value ≤0.005) to known database sequences, of which 123 matches were identified as immune-relevant genes encoding for stress proteins, pattern recognition receptors and complement proteins, proteases and protease inhibitors, cell adhesion and coagulation proteins, cytokine-related proteins, programmed cell death and proteasome-associated proteins. This first EST wide-screening analysis of the Botryllus allorecognition effector arm reveals a complex innate immune system, hallmarked by a whole genome response to allorecognition challenge.