Alternative Splicing Regulation in Polypedilum Vanderplanki under Dehydration-rehydration Cycle

Dehydration is one of the most serious stresses for any living organism. However, Polypedilum vanderplanki larvae adapted to survive extreme desiccation. The understanding of the desiccation process and adaptation to it on a molecular level could be used in the future of agriculture and medicine. The goal of this research is to explore alternative splicing changes under dehydration-rehydration cycle and its role in desiccation resistance in Polypedilum vanderplanki. We analysed alternative splicing in the RNA-seq dataset collected from the pull of P. vanderplanki larvae on different stages of anhydrobiosis. We found 1322 alternative splicing events from 717 genes significantly changed under dehydration-rehydration cycle. Furthermore, cassette exons excluded upon dehydration tend to have longer (> 100 bp) flanking introns significantly more often than constant or alternative but not dehydration-related exons. Using analysis of regulatory elements joined with gene expression analysis we identified nine motifs bound by nine sleeping chironomids’ RNA binding proteins, potentially involved in the cassette exons skipping during dehydration. Keywords: Polypedilum vanderplanki; alternative splicing; RNA binding proteins; anhydrobiosis; RNA-seq