Proteogenomic insights into the core-proteome of female reproductive tissues from crustacean amphipods

• We conducted a comparative proteomic analysis of ovaries from five Senticaudata amphipods.
• Mass spectrometry data were interpreted with several databases for taking into account molecular biodiversity.
• The conserved proteins are among the most abundant, thus protein concentrations are under strong evolutionary pressure.
• We noted an important polymorphism of large lipid transfer proteins in the analyzed animals.

As a result of the poor genome sequence coverage of crustacean amphipods, characterization of their evolutionary biology relies mostly on phenotypic traits. Here, we analyzed the proteome of ovaries from five amphipods, all from the Senticaudata suborder, with the objective to obtain insights into the core-proteome of female reproductive systems. These amphipods were from either the Gammarida infraorder: Gammarus fossarum, Gammarus pulex, Gammarus roeseli, or the Talitrida infraorder: Parhyale hawaiensis and Hyalella azteca. Ovaries from animals sampled at the end of their reproductive cycle were dissected. Their whole protein contents were extracted and their proteomes were recorded by high-throughput nanoLC–MS/MS with a high-resolution mass spectrometer. We interpreted tandem mass spectrometry data with the protein sequence resource from G. fossarum and P. hawaiensis, both recently established by RNA sequencing. The large molecular biodiversity within amphipods was assessed by the ratio of MS/MS spectra assigned for each sample, which tends to diverge rapidly along the taxonomic level considered. The core-proteome was defined as the proteins conserved along all samples, thus detectable by the homology-based proteomic assignment procedure. This specific subproteome may be further enriched in the future with the analysis of new species and update of the protein sequence resource.

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