The tobacco hornworm, Manduca sexta, is a lepidopteran model species widely used to study insect biochemical processes. Some of its larval hemolymph proteins are well studied, and a detailed proteomic analysis of larval plasma proteins became available in 2016, revealing features such as correlation with transcriptome data, formation of immune complexes, and constitution of an immune signaling system in hemolymph. It is unclear how the composition of these proteins may change in other developmental stages. In this paper, we report the proteomes of cell-free hemolymph from prepupae, pupae on day 4 and day 13, and young adults. Of the 1824 proteins identified, 907 have a signal peptide and 410 are related to immunity. Drastic changes in abundance of the storage proteins, lipophorins and vitellogenin, for instance, reflect physiological differences among prepupae, pupae, and adults. Considerably more proteins lacking signal peptide are present in the late pupae, suggesting that plasma contains relatively low concentrations of intracellular components released from remodeling tissues during metamorphosis. The defense proteins detected include 43 serine proteases and 11 serine protease homologs. Some of these proteins are members of the extracellular immune signaling network found in feeding larvae, and others may play additional roles and hence confer new features in the later life stages. In summary, the proteins and their levels revealed in this study, together with their transcriptome data, are expected to stimulate focused explorations of humoral immunity and other physiological systems in wandering larvae, pupae, and adults of M. sexta and shed light upon functional and comparative genomic research in other holometabolous insects.

烟草角虫Manduca sexta是一种广泛用于研究昆虫生化过程的鳞翅目模型物种。它的一些幼虫血淋巴蛋白得到了很好的研究，2016 年对幼虫血浆蛋白进行了详细的蛋白质组学分析，揭示了与转录组数据的相关性、免疫复合物的形成以及血淋巴中免疫信号系统的构成等特征。目前尚不清楚这些蛋白质的组成如何在其他发育阶段发生变化。在本文中，我们报告了来自预蛹、第 4 天和第 13 天的蛹以及年轻人的无细胞血淋巴的蛋白质组。在鉴定的 1824 种蛋白质中，907 种具有信号肽，410 种与免疫有关。例如，储存蛋白、脂蛋白和卵黄蛋白原丰度的剧烈变化反映了预蛹、蛹和成虫之间的生理差异。相当晚期蛹中存在更多缺乏信号肽的蛋白质，这表明血浆中含有相对低浓度的细胞内成分，这些成分是在变态过程中从重塑组织中释放出来的。检测到的防御蛋白包括 43 种丝氨酸蛋白酶和 11 种丝氨酸蛋白酶同源物。这些蛋白质中的一些是在喂养幼虫中发现的细胞外免疫信号网络的成员，而其他蛋白质可能发挥额外的作用，从而在生命后期阶段赋予新的特征。综上所述，蛋白质及其水平揭示了这项研究，他们的转录组数据一起，预期会刺激体液免疫和其他生理系统的重点勘查徘徊幼虫，蛹和成虫烟草天蛾 并阐明其他全代谢昆虫的功能和比较基因组研究。