Quantitative Proteomic Analysis of Duck Ovarian Follicles Infected with Duck Tembusu Virus by Label-Free LC-MS

Duck Tembusu virus (DTMUV) is a newly emerging pathogenic flavivirus that has caused massive economic losses to the duck industry in China. DTMUV infection mainly results in significant decreases in egg production in egg-laying ducks within 1-2 weeks post infection. However, information on the comparative protein expression of host tissues in response to DTMUV infection is limited. In the present study, the cellular protein response to DTMUV infection in duck ovarian follicles was analyzed using nano-flow high-performance liquid chromatography-electrospray tandem mass spectrometry. Quantitative proteomic analysis revealed 131 differentially expressed proteins, among which 53 were up regulated and 78 were down regulated. The identified proteins were involved in the regulation of essential processes such as cellular structure and integrity, RNA processing, protein biosynthesis and modification, vesicle transport, signal transduction, and mitochondrial pathway. Some selected proteins that were found to be regulated in DTMUV-infected tissues were screened by quantitative real-time PCR to examine their regulation at the transcriptional level, western blot analysis was used to validate the changes of some selected proteins on translational level. To our knowledge, this study is the first to analyze the proteomic changes in duck ovarian follicles following DTMUV infection. The protein-related information obtained in this study may be useful to understand the host response to DTMUV infection and the inherent mechanism of DTMUV replication and pathogenicity.