Project description:Increased heavy rainfall cause important drops in salinity to values close to 0, which can persist for several days in estuaries. Lethal and sublethal physiological and behavioural effects of decreases in salinity below ten have already been found to occur in the commercially relevant clam species Venerupis corrugata, Ruditapes decussatus and R. philippinarum and the cockle Cerastoderma edule, which generate ~74 million euros annually in Galicia (NW Spain). However, studies of the molecular response to hyposaline stress in bivalves are scarce. This ‘shotgun’ proteomics study evaluates changes in mantle-edge proteins subjected to short-term hyposaline episodes in two different months (March and May) during the gametogenic cycle. We found evidence that the effects of the gametogenic cycle on the proteome are greater than those related to the salinity treatments. However, hyposalinity modulated proteome profiles for both months in V. corrugata and C. edule and on R. philippinarum in May, involving proteins implicated in ROS production, redox homeostasis, cytoskeleton modulation and the activation of apoptotic, autophagic and lipid degradation pathways. Nevertheless, essential proteins for an optimal osmotic stress response but high energy demandants, such as chaperones, osmoprotectants and DNA repair factors, were in both large and small abundance under hyposalinity for those species. In both time points for R. decussatus and R. philippinarum in March, almost no differences between treatments were detected. These exploratory results reinforce the interest in the specific study and conservation of native species C. edule and V. corrugata, particularly sensitive to hyposalinity.
Project description:An R.decussatus microarray platform was developed to to profile gene expression in R. decussatus heavy infected by Perkinsus olseni A comparative analysis of gene expression was conducted between Grooved carpet shell clam R. decussatus individuals for non infected and infected by Perkinsus olseni clam gills. Gene expression profiling was performed using an R.decussatus oligo-DNA microarray of 43,758 probes based on single-colour detection (Cyanine-3 only). Microarrays were scanned with Agilent scanner G2565BA at a resolution of 5 microns; all slides were scanned twice at two different sensitivity settings (XDRHi 100% and XDRLo 10%); the scanner software created a unique ID for each pair of XDR scans and saved it to both scan image files. Feature Extraction (FE) 9.5 used XDR ID to link the pairs of scans together automatically when extracting data. The signal left after all the FE processing steps have been completed is ProcessedSignal that contains the Multiplicatively Detrended, Background-Subtracted Signal.
Project description:Parasites of the genus Perkinsus spp. cause high mortalities and economic losses to the most noticeable bivalves produced in the worldwide aquaculture. In this study, we analyze how P. olseni influences the gene expression profiles of hemocytes from Manila clam (Venerupis philippinarum) using experimental infections along a temporal series and a Manila clam immune-enriched DNA microarray.