Tetrodotoxin Profiles in Xanthid Crab Atergatis floridus and Blue-Lined Octopus Hapalochlaena cf. fasciata from the Same Site in Nagasaki, Japan.

The xanhid crab Atergatis floridus and the blue-lined octopus Hapalochlaena cf. fasciata have long been known as TTX-bearing organisms. It has been speculated that the TTX possessed by both organisms is exogenously toxic through the food chain, since they are reported to have geographic and individual differences. The source and supply chain of TTX for both of these organisms, however, remain unclear. On the other hand, since crabs are one of the preferred prey of octopuses, we focused our attention on the relationship between the two species living in the same site. The aim of this study was to determine TTX concentrations and TTX profiles of A. floridus and H. cf. fasciata, collected simultaneously in the same site, and examine the relationship between them. Although there were individual differences in the TTX concentration in both A. floridus and H. cf. fasciata, the toxin components commonly contained 11-norTTX-6(S)-ol in addition to TTX as the major components, with 4-epiTTX, 11-deoxyTTX, and 4,9-anhydroTTX as the minor components. The results suggest that octopuses and crabs in this site acquire TTX from common prey, including TTX-producing bacteria and/or may have a predator-prey relationship.

FuncTree2: an interactive radial tree for functional hierarchies and omics data visualization.

SUMMARY: Functional annotations and their hierarchical classification are widely used in omics workflows to build novel insight upon existing biological knowledge. Currently, a plethora of tools is available to explore omics datasets at the level of functional annotations, but there is a lack of feature rich and user-friendly tools that help scientists take advantage of their hierarchical classification for additional and often invaluable insights. Here, we present FuncTree2, a user-friendly web application that turns hierarchical classifications into interactive and highly customizable radial trees, and enables researchers to visualize their data simultaneously on all its levels. FuncTree2 features mapping of data from multiple samples and several navigation features like zooming, panning, re-rooting and collapsing of nodes or levels. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: FuncTree2 is freely available at https://bioviz.tokyo/functree2/ as a web application and a REST API. Source code is available on GitHub https://github.com/yamada-lab/functree-ng. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.