Dicathais orbita is a mollusc of the Muricidae family and is well known for the production of the expensive dye Tyrian purple and its brominated precursors that have anticancer properties, in addition to choline esters with muscle-relaxing properties. However, the biosynthetic pathways that produce these secondary metabolites in D. orbita are not known. Illumina HiSeq 2000 transcriptome sequencing of hypobranchial glands, prostate glands, albumen glands, capsule glands, and mantle and foot tissues of D. orbita generated over 201 million high quality reads that were de novo assembled into 219,437 contigs. Annotation with reference to the Nr, Swiss-Prot and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) databases identified candidate-coding regions in 76,152 of these contigs, with transcripts for many enzymes in various metabolic pathways associated with secondary metabolite biosynthesis represented. This study revealed that D. orbita expresses a number of genes associated with indole, sulfur and histidine metabolism pathways that are relevant to Tyrian purple precursor biosynthesis, and many of which were not found in the fully annotated genomes of three other molluscs in the KEGG database. However, there were no matches to known bromoperoxidase enzymes within the D. orbita transcripts. These transcriptome data provide a significant molecular resource for gastropod research in general and Tyrian purple producing Muricidae in particular.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 3. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 14 August 2016.
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#16,015,406
of 27,781,301 outputs
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#1,501
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Outputs of similar age
#153,986
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Outputs of similar age from Marine Drugs
#23
of 53 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 27,781,301 research outputs across all sources so far. This one is in the 41st percentile – i.e., 41% of other outputs scored the same or lower than it.
So far Altmetric has tracked 4,124 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a little more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 5.6. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 63% of its peers.
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We're also able to compare this research output to 53 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 56% of its contemporaries.
