Project description:Effect of CaM overexpression on Arabidopsis transcriptome. Unlike animals, plants are immobile and cannot simply move away from unfavourable environments and thus have developed complex mechanisms to respond to and sense biotic and abiotic signals. These stimuli often lead to tightly controlled changes in cytoplasmic free calcium concentration [Ca2+]cyt termed "calcium signatures" which are thought to be, at least partly, responsible for the specificity of plant responses to the environment. However little is known about how exactly these calcium signatures are decoded into specific end-responses. Calmodulin (CaM) is the most well characterised Ca2+ binding protein and is the primary sensor of changing [Ca2+]. Upon binding Ca2+ CaM undergoes a conformational change allowing binding and activation of a wide variety of target proteins. In plants CaM exists in gene families encoding multiple isoforms. The expression of individual CaM genes can be differentially regulated and isoforms may be differentially localised. Furthermore specific isoforms can bind and activate different target proteins. These features of plant CaM allow the possibility of specificity during calcium signalling in response to specific stimuli. The effect of overexpression of four CaM protein isoforms on the Arabidopsis thaliana transcriptome will be investigated. Ten day old transgenic Arabidopsis seedlings (containing estradiol inducible CaM overexpression constructs) were induced for 9hrs in 5uM estradiol with appropriate water (0.025% DMSO) and empty vector controls.
Project description:YerA41 is a myoviridae bacteriophage that was originally isolated due its ability to infect Yersinia ruckeri bacteria, the causative agent of enteric redmouth disease of salmonid fish. Several attempts to determine its genomic DNA sequence using traditional and next generation sequencing technologies failed, indicating that the phage genome is modified such way that it is an unsuitable template for PCR amplification and sequencing. To determine the YerA41 genome sequence we isolated RNA from phage-infected Y. ruckeri cells at different time points post-infection, and sequenced it. The host-genome specific reads were substracted and de novo assembly was performed on the unaligned reads.