Meeting Abstract

10.3  Friday, Jan. 4  RNA-Seq uncovers extensive differential expression of metabolic genes in symbiotic versus aposymbiotic cnidarians LEHNERT, EM*; MOUCHKA, ME; BURRIESCI, MS; SCHWARZ, J; PRINGLE, JR; Department of Genetics, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA 94025; Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14817 ; Department of Genetics, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA 94025; Biology Department, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY 12604; Department of Genetics, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA 94025 elehnert@stanford.edu

Aiptasia pallida, a small sea anemone that hosts dinoflagellates similar or identical to those found in reef-building corals, is being developed as a model system for study of the underlying molecular and cell biology of cnidarian-dinoflagellate symbiosis. As a step to that end, we have sequenced and assembled the transcriptome of both aposymbiotic (dinoflagellate-free) and symbiotic Aiptasia using the Illumina sequencing platform. We have also developed a support vector machine learning algorithm to identify the organism of origin for each transcript, which was 97% accuracy on our test sets. A comparison of transcript levels revealed extensive differences between aposymbiotic and symbiotic animals, with many changes in the levels of transcripts encoding transporters and metabolic enzymes. We identified 38 classes of transporters that are differentially regulated, as well as transcripts from pathways involved fatty acid metabolism, sulfur-containing amino acid synthesis, and carbon-nitrogen metabolism.