Author:

Keywords:

caenorhabditis-elegans, mass-spectrometry, gene-expression, honey-bee, neuropeptide, identification, mellifera, behavior, family, Science & Technology, Multidisciplinary Sciences, Science & Technology - Other Topics, CAENORHABDITIS-ELEGANS, GENE-EXPRESSION, HONEY-BEE, NEUROPEPTIDE, IDENTIFICATION, FAMILY, Algorithms, Amino Acid Motifs, Amino Acid Sequence, Animals, Bees, Brain Chemistry, Codon, Computational Biology, Genes, Insect, Genome, Insect, Insect Proteins, Mass Spectrometry, Molecular Sequence Data, Neuropeptides, Protein Precursors, Proteome, General Science & Technology

Abstract:

Neuropeptides, critical brain peptides that modulate animal behavior by affecting the activity of almost every neuronal circuit, are inherently difficult to predict directly from a nascent genome sequence because of extensive posttranslational processing. The combination of bioinformatics and proteomics allows unprecedented neuropeptide discovery from an unannotated genome. Within the Apis mellifera genome, we have inferred more than 200 neuropeptides and have confirmed the sequences of 100 peptides. This study lays the groundwork for future molecular studies of Apis neuropeptides with the identification of 36 genes, 33 of which were previously unreported.