Project description:Color is an important trait in nature, playing a role in selection and speciation. The most important colorants in crustaceans are carotenoids, which in complexes with carotenoid-binding proteins provide an astonishing variety of colors from red to violet. Over 350 species and subspecies of amphipods (Crustacea: Amphipoda) endemic to Lake Baikal exhibit an impressive variability of colors and coloration patterns. However, the mechanisms forming this diversity are underexplored. In this work, we analyze the coloration of two species of endemic Lake Baikal amphipods, Eulimnogammarus cyaneus and E. vittatus. These species are brightly colored and, even more importantly, characterized by intraspecific color variability. We showed that the color of either species strongly correlated with the abundance of two putative carotenoid-binding proteins (the relative abundance of these proteins was higher in blue or teal-colored animals than in the orange- or yellow-colored ones.). With LC-MS/MS, we were able to identifiy these proteins, which turned out to be similar to the pheromone/odorant-binding protein family.
Project description:Aquatic microbial communities contain a vast amount of genetic diversity and we have much to learn about how this manifests to functional diversity. Existing long-term time series data includes 16S tags, metagenomes, single amplified genomes (SAGs), and genomes from metagenomes (GFMs). Information about functional diversity and metabolic capabilities is often unavailable. The study sites include three lakes that are the subject of intense study through the North Temperate Lakes Long Term Ecological Research site: Sparkling Lake (oligotrophic), Lake Mendota (eutrophic), and Trout Bog Lake (dystrophic).
The work (proposal:https://doi.org/10.46936/10.25585/60000947) conducted by the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (https://ror.org/04xm1d337), a DOE Office of Science User Facility, is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy operated under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231.
Project description:Lake sediment microbial communities from Lake Baikal, Russia to study Microbial Dark Matter (Phase II) - Lake Baikal sediment 0-5 cm metagenome
