Identification and analysis of insulin like peptides in nematode secretomes provide targets for parasite control

Insulin-like (ins) peptides play an important role in development and metabolism across the metazoa. In nematodes, these are also required for dauer formation and longevity and are expressed in different types of neurons across various life stages which demonstrate their role in parasites and could become possible targets for parasite control. To date, many nematode genomes are publically available. However, a systematic screening of ins peptides across different nematode group has not been reported. In the present study, we systematically identified ins peptides in the secretomes of 73 nematodes with fully sequenced genomes covering five different groups viz. plant parasitic, animal parasitic, human parasitic, entomopathogenic and free living nematodes. From the total of 93,949 secretory proteins, 176 proteins were uniquely mapped to 40 identified C. elegans ins families. The obtained result showed that 74.15% of the identified ins proteins were represented in free living nematodes only and remaining 25.84% were combinedly identified in all other nematode groups. The ins-1, ins-17 and ins-18 were the only ins families which were detected in all the studied nematode groups. Out of 176 proteins, 96 of ins proteins were predicted as hydrophilic in nature and 39 proteins were found stable using ProtParam analysis. Our study provides insight into the distribution of ins peptides across different group of nematodes and this information could be useful for further experimental study.