Wang K, Omotezako T, Kishi K, Nishida H, Onuma TA.

Dev Genes Evol. 2015 Jun;225(3):149-59. doi:10.1007/s00427-015-0502-7

Maternal and zygotic transcriptomes in the appendicularian, Oikopleura dioica: novel protein-encoding genes, intra-species sequence variations, and trans-spliced RNA leader.

Only one splice leader was found and it was identical to the one reported by Ganot. “Samples were prepared from cohorts of a single pair.” “The transcript sequences showed a high degree of variability between the Japanese and Norwegian O. dioica populations. The average degrees of nucleotide and amino acid sequence conservation were 91.0 and 94.8 %, respectively.” “In the present analysis, the SL was observed in 40.8 % of mRNA species. It showed preferential linkage to adenine at the 5′ ends of the downstream exons. Intriguingly, the trans-splicing occurs more frequently in eggs than in larvae.” “Among the 12,311 assembled transcripts, 63 and 99 % were detected in eggs and larvae, respectively. Thus, the mRNAs of most of genes are present at the developing larval stage. In this quick developer, it is most probable that residual maternal mRNAs are still preserved in 8 hpf larvae.” “The raw data were deposited in the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) Short Read Archive (SRP accession number: SRP050571, run accession numbers are SRR1693762, SRR1693765, SRR1693766, and SRR1693767) and Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO accession: GSE64421).”