Meeting Abstract
P2.34 Saturday, Jan. 5 The Transcriptome of Antarctic Sea Urchin (Sterechinus neumayeri) Larvae DILLY, GF*; HOFMANN, G; Univ. of California, Santa Barbara; Univ. of California, Santa Barbara geoff.dilly@lifesci.ucsb.edu
A commonly found Antarctic echinoid, Sterechinus neumayeri has been used as a model species in ecology, physiology, larval and reproductive biology. Reflecting a focus on global change research, current larval studies have focused on the effects of thermal stress and elevated CO2 on the physiology and development of S. neumayeri larvae. To complement morphological and physiological investigations on experimentally treated larvae, transcriptomic and proteomic analyses will be necessary to understand the underlying biomolecular responses to these multiple stresses. However, because there is no completed genome for this species, it is necessary to first build a transcriptome reference library for further experimental research. To this end, we collaborated with the Center for Genomics and Bioinformatics at Indiana University to pyrosequence an inclusive transcriptome of larval S. neumayeri maintained under a variety of conditions and multiple life stages. Thirteen larval samples were used to create the cDNA library, representing treatments on day 11 (early gastrula), 19 (early pluteus), and 30 (pluteus) of development. Each developmental stage included larvae maintained at three CO2 levels averaging 421, 652, and 1071 ppm. To identify potential thermal stress response gene candidates in our cDNA library, four additional heat shocked samples with temperatures ranging from 0 °C to 20 °C were included. A normalized cDNA pool was sequenced using 454 technology resulting in 1.34M reads with an average length of 600 base pairs for a total library 689M bp. Analysis of the annotated results are presented here. This library will be fundamentally important to progressing genomic, proteomic, and comparative research on this model species.
