Generation and analysis of transcriptomic resources for a model system on the rise: the sea anemone Aiptasia pallida and its dinoflagellate endosymbiont.

ABSTRACT:

Background

The most diverse marine ecosystems, coral reefs, depend upon a functional symbiosis between cnidarian hosts and unicellular dinoflagellate algae. The molecular mechanisms underlying the establishment, maintenance, and breakdown of the symbiotic partnership are, however, not well understood. Efforts to dissect these questions have been slow, as corals are notoriously difficult to work with. In order to expedite this field of research, we generated and analyzed a collection of expressed sequence tags (ESTs) from the sea anemone Aiptasia pallida and its dinoflagellate symbiont (Symbiodinium sp.), a system that is gaining popularity as a model to study cellular, molecular, and genomic questions related to cnidarian-dinoflagellate symbioses.

Results

A set of 4,925 uniq

SUBMITTER: Sunagawa S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2702317 | biostudies-literature | 2009 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature