Plant & Animal Genomes XIII Conference

January 15-19, 2005
Town & Country Convention Center
San Diego, CA

FISH And Chips: Microarrays And Their Use For Exploring Organism/Environment Interactions

Andrew Y Gracey¹ , Andrew R Cossins²

¹  Hopkins Marine Station of Stanford University, Oceanview Blvd, Pacific Grove, CA 93950

²  School of Biological Sciences, University of Liverpool, L39 7ZB, UK

A key factor in the survival and continued success of organisms in climatically variable environments is their ability to display a suite of adaptive responses that promote both the constancy of their constituent physiological processes and increase tolerance to damaging or lethal conditions. Relatively little is known about the mechanisms underpinning these responses in aquatic organisms. Deploying a high-throughput microarray-based approach, we have investigated the transcriptional component of the teleost fishes, common carp (Cyprinus carpio), and the long-jaw mudsucker (Gillichthys mirabilis), to a variety of environmental challenges. A microarray for each species was constructed using >10,000 mostly non-redundant cDNA amplicons isolated from a collection of normalized and serially-subtracted cDNA libraries. A time-course analysis of the transcriptional response to environmental cold and hypoxia will be discussed in detail. Discrete and overlapping sets of genes were regulated in different tissues in response to stress, suggesting that the differentiated tissues possess distinct functional roles in adaptation. The integration of the expression data with other indices of physiological condition, in particular metabolite levels, will be presented. These studies provide a uniquely broad overview of the complex process of adaptive regulation in vertebrate animals following exposure to environmentally significant stress.