The transcriptome of anterior regeneration in earthworm Eudrilus eugeniae

The oligochaete earthworm, Eudrilus eugeniae is capable of regenerating both anterior and posterior segments. The present study focuses on the transcriptome analysis of earthworm E. eugeniae to identify and functionally annotate the key genes supporting the anterior blastema formation and regulating the anterior regeneration of the worm. The Illumina sequencing generated a total of 91,593,182 raw reads which were assembled into 105,193 contigs using CLC genomics workbench. In total, 40,946 contigs were annotated against the NCBI nr and SwissProt database and among them, 15,702 contigs were assigned to 14,575 GO terms. Besides a total of 9389 contigs were mapped to 416 KEGG biological pathways. The RNA-Seq comparison study identified 10,868 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) and of them, 3986 genes were significantly upregulated in the anterior regenerated blastema tissue samples of the worm. The GO enrichment analysis showed angiogenesis and unfolded protein binding as the top enriched functions and the pathway enrichment analysis denoted TCA cycle as the most significantly enriched pathway associated with the upregulated gene dataset of the worm. The identified DEGs and their function and pathway information can be effectively utilized further to interpret the key cellular, genetic and molecular events associated with the regeneration of the worm.