Project description:Perkinsus marinus is an intracellular parasitic protozoan that is responsible for serious disease epizootics in marine bivalve molluscs worldwide and along with P. olseni belongs to the OIE list of notified diseases. Despite all available information on P. marinus genomics, more baseline data is required at the proteomic level for a better understanding of P. marinus biological processes, including virulence mechanisms. In the present study, we have established in vitro clonal cultures of P. marinus from infected gills and mantle tissues of C. rhizophorae to evaluate the parasite cellular proteomic profile. A high throughput label-free shotgun HDMS approach using nanoUPLC-MS was used. Our intention was to provide the first comprehensive proteome profile of P. marinus that might serve as a valuable resource for future investigations involving comparative analyses of P. marinus from different regions, as well as comparisons of different species of Perkinsus.
Project description:In this study, we explored the metabolic processes of P. marinus under lipid deprived conditions to elucidate the interchanging flux of lipid and carbohydrate metabolism. Though P. marinus can synthesize their own lipids from available nutrients, they display a slower growth in media not supplemented with lipids as opposed to media with lipids. Under these conditions, using transcriptomics, we surprisingly observed evidence of stimulated lipid degradation through increased transcription of two core β-oxidation pathway enzymes.
