ИСТИНА

Study of diversity and plasticity of marine invertebrate development is an important source of knowledge and progress in various aspects of fundamental and applied biosciences. Though the processes of differentiation and aging of the multicellular organisms are known to be irreversible, the unique processes of reprogramming/reverse development were described in a certain species of Cnidarians. In this project we aimed to describe the model of gene regulation of reverse development of jellyfish Aurelia aurita. At the beginning, we established the laboratory model of A. aurita originally collected on the Black sea and characterized in details the morphological processes of its direct and reverse development. We also re-sequenced A. aurita genome with a low coverage and confirmed the phylogenetic identity of our model specie. To determine the major factors of the life cycle reprogramming we collected samples on various developmental stages of A. aurita and performed deep sequencing of mRNA transcriptomes. Using modern bioinformatic approaches, a spectrum of genes that alter activity in the processes of forward and reverse development of the jellyfish A. aurita was identified. Functional study revealed multiple signaling pathways and transcription factors, orchestrated in the course of development, which were compared to the existing data on other Cnidarians. Specific activation of TGF-beta signaling pathway genes (e.g. BMPR2, SMAD6) during strobilation and wnt genes in reverse development is discussed. This project was supported by RFBR and Sirius University of Science and Technology (no. 19-315-51015).