Analysis of gene expression and protein synthesis related to hypobiosis of Teladorsagia circumcincta

Teladorsagia circumcincta is an important causative agent of parasitic gastroenteritis in small ruminants in temperate regions. Under unfavourable environmental conditions, T. circumcincta is able to arrest larval development within a host (hypobiosis); molecular and biochemical mechanisms of this phenomenon have not yet been fully described. Hypobiosis is in principle similar to the “dauer larva”, a well defined developmental stage of the free-living nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. The expression of daf genes in T. circumcincta infective larvae was analyzed using the microarray chip designed for C. elegans. T. circumcincta larvae induced to hypobiosis (I) were compared to T. circumcincta larvae with standard development (S). In the group “I” we identified 33 genes as significantly differentially expressed; in the group “S” 12 genes were downregulated and 21 genes were upregulated. The microarray results were correlated to the dataset of proteins mass spectrometrically identified in excretory-secretory products of nematodes from both groups. Proteins considered to be involved in hypobiosis pathways were detected, but no significant differences in relative expression of these proteins between compared groups were observed. Only four differentially expressed genes detected by the microarray analysis were assigned to at least one protein that was identified by mass spectrometry, but showed opposite relative expression. Only one gene-protein pair exhibited the equal expression trend in both the microarray and the mass spectrometry data. We can conclude that further qPCR gene expression analysis of gene candidates should be the next step in investigation of hypobiosis molecular background.