Project description:This project contains sperm and seminal fluids proteomes from selected species of passerine birds: Taeniopygia guttata, Hirundo rustica, Chloris chloris, Acrocephalus palustris, Cinclus cinclus, Phylloscopus collybita. We employed label-free proteomics to generate proteomes in the zebra finch, a songbird species with annotated genome and five wild-living songbirds representing five families within the Passerida clade, all with poorly known genomes. The results show that protein mapping of the new passerine proteomes to zebra finch genome was successful, thus, yielding highly similar protein identifications and a sufficient number of unique peptides in all the studied proteomes.
Project description:As humans alter the landscape, wildlife have become increasingly dependent on anthropogenic resources, altering interactions between individuals and subsequently disease transmission dynamics. Further, nutritional quantity and quality greatly impact an individual host’s immune capacity and ability to mitigate damage caused by infectious disease. Thus, understanding the impact of dietary nutrition on immune function is critical for predicting disease severity and transmission as human activity both facilitates the dispersal of pathogens and alters dietary options for wildlife. Here, we use transcriptomics to explore the previously unstudied molecular mechanisms underpinning diet-driven differences in pathogen tolerance using a widespread avian bacterial pathogen, Mycoplasma gallisepticum (MG). MG is an ideal model for understanding the dietary drivers of disease as the human supplementation that wild birds commonly rely on, bird feeders, are also an important source for MG transmission. Significant diet-driven differences in the expression of many genes encoding immune response and translational machinery proteins are seen both in the absence of MG and during the recovery period. Prior to infection, protein-fed birds are more transcriptionally primed for infection than lipid-fed birds which translates to greater tolerance in protein-fed birds during the recovery period. Given the significant importance of human supplemented food in wildlife disease systems, the molecular mechanisms by which interactions between diet and infection emerge provide insight into the ecological and immunological consequences of human behavior and wildlife disease.