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:Raw RNA sequences of purple sulfur bacterium Chromatium okenii strain LaCa isolated form the chemocline of meromictic Lake Cadagno. Study involves the investigation of the differences in the gene expression level between two different times of the summer season (July vs September), during the day and at night.
Project description:Deep Lake is a hypersaline system in Antarctica (68°33’36.8S, 78°11’48.7E) that is so saline it remains liquid at –20°C (DeMaere et al 2013). The lake is dominated by haloarchaea, comprising a low-complexity community that differs greatly to warm-hot latitude hypersaline systems, is hierarchical structured, and supports a high level of intergenera gene exchange. Metaproteomics was performed on biomass that was collected in the austral summer of 2008 by sequential size fractionation (20 – 3 µm, 3 – 0.8 µm, 0.8 – 0.1 µm). The data were integrated to obtain a systems level view of the active host-virus interactions occurring in this novel aquatic Antarctic system. DeMaere MZ, Williams TJ, Allen MA, Brown MV, Gibson JA, Rich J, Lauro FM, Dyall-Smith M, Davenport KW, Woyke T, Kyrpides NC, Tringe SG, Cavicchioli R (2013) High level of intergenera gene exchange shapes the evolution of haloarchaea in an isolated Antarctic lake. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 110: 16939-16944
Project description:Adult pike Esox lucius was caught in the end of summer (August, 2020) in Teletskoye Lake (Altai region, west Siberia, Russia, 51°79’10’’ N, 87°30’43’’E). Parasite (Triaenophorus crassus) was retrieved from the intestine of pike and immediately frozen in liquid nitrogen. After that, the sample was lyophilized and sent in ice (-20 °C) to the Group of mass spectrometry of Shemyakin-Ovchinnikov Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry RAS (Moscow, Russia) where further analysis was performed.