Project description:The skin mucus of gilthead sea bream was mapped by 1-DE followed by liquid chromatography coupled to high resolution mass spectrometry using a quadrupole time-of-flight mass analyzer. More than 2000 proteins were identified with a protein score filter of 30. The identified proteins were represented in 418 canonical pathways of the Ingenuity Pathway software. After filtering by canonical pathway overlapping, the retained proteins were clustered in three groups. The mitochondrial cluster contained 59 proteins related to oxidative phosphorylation and mitochondrial dysfunction. The second cluster contained 79 proteins related to antigen presentation and protein ubiquitination pathways. The third cluster contained 257 proteins where proteins related to protein synthesis, cellular assembly, and epithelial integrity were over-represented. The latter group also included acute phase response signaling. In parallel, 2-DE methodology identified six proteins spots of different protein abundance when comparing unstressed fish with chronically stressed fish in an experimental model that mimicked daily farming activities. The major changes were associated with a higher abundance of cytokeratin 8 in the skin mucus proteome of stressed fish, which was confirmed by immunoblotting. Overall, these results indicate that skin mucus is a reliable tissue for alternative or complementary stress phenotyping in fish farming.
Project description:In vitro experiments have contributed to numerous fields of knowledge, including fish skeletal muscle. Despite improved strategies, in vitro assays still show discrepancies with in vivo systems, especially for non-model organisms. In this sense, we characterized the transcriptional profile of pacus (Piaractus mesopotamicus) muscle cells in vitro and in vivo. Processes related to proliferation, glycolytic metabolism, and extracellular matrix were enriched in vitro, while energy production, muscle contraction, and amino acid pro-cessing were enriched in vivo. Through qPCR, the genes fn1a (fibronectin 1a), hk1 (hexokinase 1) and ctnnb1 (catenin beta 1), respectively related to extracellular matrix, glycolytic metabo-lism, and cell proliferation and differentiation, were highly expressed in vitro. The genes ckma (creatine kinase, muscle a), acat1 (acetyl-CoA acetyltransferase 1), mdh2 (malate dehydrogenase 2) and pkmb (pyruvate kinase M1/2b), respectively associated with ATP production, fatty acid oxidation, oxidative and glycolytic metabolism, and the genes musk (muscle, skeletal, receptor tyrosine kinase), chrna1 (cholinergic receptor, nicotinic, alpha 1) and clu (clusterin), in-volved in cell signaling, were highly expressed in vivo. Our findings may support the de-velopment of molecular strategies to enhance muscle cell culture technology and expand knowledge for in vitro meat production, improving sustainable fish farming.