甲壳动物中白斑综合征病毒来源小RNA的特征及其保守富集的结构基础OA

To systematically investigate the characteristics of white spot syndrome virus(WSSV)-derived small inter-fering RNAs(vsiRNAs)in different crustacean hosts,publicly available small RNA and miRNA sequencing datasets of crustaceans were retrieved and analyzed from the NCBI SRA database.After data preprocessing,all reads were strin-gently mapped to the WSSV reference genome using a zero-mismatch strategy.Based on the mapping results,five representative crustacean hosts,Penaeus vannamei,P.penicillatus,Scylla paramamosain,Carcinus maenas,and Procambarus clarkii,were selected for analysis of WSSV-derived vsiRNA characteristics.The results showed that abundant WSSV-derived vsiRNAs were detected in P.vannamei and C.maenas,with a predominant length of 22 nt and distribution on both the positive and negative strands of the viral genome,exhibiting typical features of small inter-fering RNAs.In contrast,the other three hosts displayed much lower amounts of WSSV-derived vsiRNAs with dispersed length distributions and no obvious dominant peak.Although overall distribution patterns of WSSV-derived vsiRNAs varied among hosts,shared genomic regions of WSSV consistently exhibited vsiRNA enrichment across multiple species.Sequence and structural features of these hotspot regions,including elevated GC content,lower mini-mum free energy,and enrichment of conserved motifs forming double-stranded or hairpin structures,suggest that RNA secondary structure may contribute to the preferential processing of these regions by the RNAi pathway.This study provides a comparative overview of WSSV-derived vsiRNA characteristics in five crustacean species based on public sequencing data,and offers insights into crustacean RNAi responses to WSSV infection and a reference for future stu-dies on antiviral mechanisms and RNAi-based disease control strategies.