Effect of water temperature on the behavior of Neptunea cumingii and the histology, immune enzyme activity, and transcriptome of its gills and kidneys

Abstract

The behavior of the marine snail Neptunea cumingii cultured at different temperatures (0, 4, 8, 12, 16 (control), 20, 24, and 28 °C) and the histology, immune enzyme activity, and transcriptome of its gills and kidneys were studied using ecological and molecular methods. At 0 °C, most of the snails shrank in size and did not eat during the first 6 h. At 28 °C, snails also did not eat, death began to occur at 24 h. The histology of the gills and kidneys differed among test temperatures. At 0 °C, the morphology of the gill pieces was difficult to judge. At 24 °C, edema was present in the gill lamella, and at 28 °C the gill lamella were severely deformed. Temperature increase or decrease from 16 °C caused the columnar cells of the kidney to become shorter and more numerous. The total antioxidant capacity (T-AOC), catalase (CAT) and superoxide dismutase activities (SOD) of the gill and kidney differed significantly among the temperature conditions (p < 0.05). The DEGs were subject to GO and KEGG enrichment analysis, and which showed that most of the DEGs in gill were involved in protein folding, defolding, translation, ribosome, and most of the DEGs in kidney were involved in DNA recombination, nuclear euchromatin, RNA-directed DNA polymerase activity. Finally, the results from this study showed that N. cumingii prefers the temperature range was 8 to 16 °C.