Meeting Abstract

P2.76  Saturday, Jan. 5  From Transcriptome to Interactome: Getting the Slipper Snail Ready for the Ball HELFRICH, LW*; JOHANSSON, KB; DIAMOND, J; FISCHER, AHL; LYONS, D; HENRY, JJ; SMITH, J; Marine Biological Laboratory; Marine Biological Laboratory; Marine Biological Laboratory; Marine Biological Laboratory; Duke University; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Marine Biological Laboratory kimberly.johansson@gmail.com

How did the animal body plan arise? What are the underlying molecular mechanisms driving the diversification of animal forms? The slipper snail Crepidula fornicata serves as an excellent model organism to explore these questions. Like the majority of the members of the “forgotten phylum” Lophotrochozoa, Crepidula develops according to a spiral cleavage pattern. Though this mode of early development is distinct from embryogenesis in other animals, spiralians also form body axes and germ layers common to bilaterians. In other words, different modes of development create a similar body plan. In order to gain a molecular understanding of the processes of early development, we prepared cDNA libraries at 20 time points from early cleavage stages through the onset of gastrulation for sequencing on the Illumina HiSeq1000. Additionally, we treated embryos at the four-cell stage with the MAPK inhibitor U0126, a drug shown previously to induce a loss of dorsoventral axis formation, and prepared and sequenced cDNA libraries from these embryos. Results from our combined RNA-seq experiments establish a reference transcriptome, providing a community resource of C. fornicata gene models. Ongoing analyses from our time series and perturbation data will identify zygotic regulatory transitions and potential gene-gene interactions, and thus provide a basis for further gene network studies into the origins of diversity and uniformity in animal body plans.