Molecular characterization of two novel esterase genes from carmine spider mite, Tetranychus cinnabarinus （Acarina： Tetranychidae）

Two novel esterase complementary DNAs were identified and cloned from the insecticide-susceptible strain of Tetranychus cinnabarinus （Boisduval） （Acarina： Tetrany- chidae）, which were designated as TCE1 and TCE2, respectively. The cDNA of TCE1 gene contained an open reading frame （ORF） of 1701 bp encoding 567 amino acids, and a predicted molecular weight of 62.75 kDa, the cDNA of TCE2 contained an ORF of 1680 bp encoding 560 amino acids, and a predicted molecular weight of 63.14 kDa. TCE1 and TCE2 were submitted to GenBank, accession number EU 130461 and EU 130462. The well-conserved sequence motif, GXSXG, used as a signature pattern in the esterase fam- ily are present in both TCE1 and TCE2 （GQSAG in TCE1, whereas GESAG in TCE2）, indicating that these two genes are predicted to be esterases. Comparison of the deduced amino acid sequence with the published mite esterase sequence coming from Boophilus microplus showed that TCE1 shares 33.98% identity and TCE2 shares 33.46% identity. TCE1 and TCE2 share 46.4% identity. Quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction revealed that expression level of the TCE2 gene was relatively higher than that of the TCE1 in all instars examined except the protonymph, and the expression level of these two esterase genes in adults of T. cinnabarinus was significantly higher than that in any other instars, respectively. T. cinnabarinus is an important agricultural mite pest and esterases are important in the metabolisms of insects and mites; the genomic information obtained in this study will contribute to esterase molecular biological study on mite pest species.

Rediscovery and analysis of Phytophthora carbohydrate esterase(CE) genes revealing their evolutionary diversity

A continuous co-evolutionary arms-race between pathogens and their host plants promotes the development of pathogenic factors by microbes, including carbohydrate esterase(CE) genes to overcome the barriers in plant cell walls. Identification of CEs is essential to facilitate their functional and evolutionary investigations; however, current methods may have a limit in detecting some conserved domains, and ignore evolutionary relationships of CEs, as well as do not distinguish CEs from proteases. Here, candidate CEs were annotated using conserved functional domains, and orthologous gene detection and phylogenetic relationships were used to identify new CEs in 16 oomycete genomes, excluding genes with protease domains. In our method, 41 new putative CEs were discovered comparing to current methods, including three CE4, 14 CE5, eight CE12, five CE13, and 11 CE14. We found that significantly more CEs were identified in Phytophthora than in Hyaloperonospora and Pythium, especially CE8, CE12, and CE13 that are putatively involved in pectin degradation. The abundance of these CEs in Phytophthora may be due to a high frequency of multiple-copy genes, supporting by the phylogenetic distribution of CE13 genes, which showed five units of Phytophthora CE13 gene clusters each displaying a species tree like topology, but without any gene from Hyaloperonospora or Pythium species. Additionally, diverse proteins associated with products of CE13 genes were identified in Phytophthora strains. Our analyses provide a highly effective method for CE discovery, complementing current methods, and have the potential to advance our understanding of function and evolution of CEs.