Meeting Abstract

P1.145  Wednesday, Jan. 4  Evolutionary Genomics of Visual System Complexity: Expressed Opsin Diversity in Stomatopod Crustaceans PORTER, M.L.*; HAYNES, B.; CRANDALL, K.A.; OAKLEY, T.H.; CRONIN, T.W.; Univ. of Maryland Baltimore County, MD; Brigham Young Univ., Provo, UT; Brigham Young Univ., Provo, UT; Univ. of California, Santa Barbara; Univ. of Maryland Baltimore County, MD porter@umbc.edu

Stomatopod crustaceans have complex and diverse visual systems, containing unique features that exist in no other animals. These features include a specialized ommatidial region (the midband), intrarhabdomal filtering of photoreceptors used in color vision, and receptors devoted to the detection of polarized light. The most complex stomatopod eye type contains 6 midband rows, 4 intrarhabdomal filters, and 16 physiologically different photoreceptor classes. However, there are also species with variations in the number of midband rows, photoreceptor classes, and filters present. Previous studies of retinal opsins found significantly more transcripts than predicted in all species investigated thus far, and characterizing all of the expressed opsins in any particular species has been a difficult task. To understand the complete diversity of opsins expressed in stomatopod retinas, transcriptomes have been sequenced from four species representing different superfamilies and exhibiting variations in eye design: Neogonodactylus oerstedii (6 midband rows, 4 intrarhabdomal filters); Pseudosquilla ciliata (6 rows, 3 filters ); Hemisquilla californiensis (6 rows, 2 filters); and Squilla empusa (2 rows, 0 filters). Using a combination of directed searches of the assembled transcriptome and annotation approaches, a large diversity of opsin transcripts was recovered from all species, including transcripts similar to arthropod visual system opsins. Unexpected opsins were also recovered, including transcripts similar to the vertebrate peropsins.