Meeting Abstract
Bryozoans are a diverse phylum of marine and freshwater colonial invertebrates containing over 5,000 described living species. Bryozoans grow by budding of new colony members (zooids) from a metamorphosed larva, however, these modules often come in different shapes and sizes and are specialized to serve different tasks within the colony. Zooids range in function from feeding to reproduction, structure, defense, and colony attachment. A complex interaction of genotype, environment, and developmental pathway shapes zooid formation, however, the specific mechanisms underlying the establishment of this division of labor remain unknown. I am investigating the development and morphology of lab-cultured Bugula stolonifera using RNA-sequencing, differential gene analysis, and confocal imaging. I developed a technique to extract high-quality mRNA from small colony structures (<100 μm avicularia and <50 μm avicularia buds) by pooling together dissected tissue from a single genetic individual, enabling building cDNA libraries for three different zooid types at two different developmental states with three biological replicates per tissue. Sequencing on the Illumina platform yielded 298 million paired-end reads (after quality control) to build the reference transcriptome, which is currently in assembly via the Trinity pipeline. I will pair subsequent differential gene expression analyses with confocal imaging of different zooid types throughout development, to form an understanding of the developmental mechanisms involved in the formation of the zooids of B. stolonifera and provide new insights into the evolution of coloniality and polymorphism in bryozoans.
