Mechanisms of stress adaptation in fish: the role of changes in gene expression

压力是所有生物体生活的一个重要方面。压力的研究在水生物种中特别重要，例如具有社会，美学或经济重要性的鱼类。压力可以由外部物理或生物环境或生物体进行的某些过程（例如，猎物捕获、进食、交配等）。虽然从现代人类生活的标准来看，压力这个词已经有了负面的含义，但并不是所有的压力都是坏的。当一个生物体能够通过激活一系列适应来消除或减轻压力（所谓的“eustress”）来应对压力时，压力可以被视为积极的。只有当这些应对机制被超越时，压力才会变成负面的（痛苦）。该提案描述了旨在更好地理解几种鱼类（蟾鱼及其亲属，角鲨和虹鳟鱼）的压力机制的比较实验。直到最近，生物学家还不得不通过一次检查一个基因或基因家族来研究鱼类对压力的反应。然而，通过广泛的DNA测序和微阵列（芯片）实验，我们现在能够一次研究单个生物体中数千个基因的反应。因此，这项研究将扩展我们过去的方法，检查单基因（主要是那些氮废物的生产和排泄）与基于微阵列的方法来研究多个基因对压力的反应。我们将研究的压力/过程是拥挤压力，空气暴露，氨暴露，大量零星膳食的摄入，缺氧和运动。通过研究大量的基因，多个物种和多个压力源，我们希望获得更广泛的赞赏的基因是共同的所有压力，基因是特定于只有一些压力，以及更普遍的压力是如何改变基因表达的模式在鱼。

Stress is an important aspect of life for all organisms. The study of stress is especially important in aquatic species such as fish that are of societal, aesthetic or economic importance. Stress can be imposed by the external physical or biological environment, or some process that an organism undertakes (e.g., prey capture, feeding, mating, etc.). While the term stress has come to have a negative connotation by the standards of modern human life, not all stress is bad. Stress can be viewed as a positive when an organism is capable of coping with stress by activating a series of adaptations to remove itself from or mitigate the stress (so-called 'eustress'). It is only when these coping mechanisms are exceeded that stress becomes a negative (distress). This proposal describes comparative experiments aimed at a better mechanistic understanding of stress in several species of fish (toadfish and its relatives, dogfish sharks, and rainbow trout). Until recently, biologists have had to study reactions of fish to stress by examining one gene or gene family at a time. However, through extensive DNA sequencing and microarray (chip) experiments, we are now able to study the responses of  literally thousands of genes in a single organism at a time. Therefore, this research will extend our past approach of examining single genes (primarily those of nitrogen waste production and excretion) with the microarray-based approaches to study multiple gene responses to stress. The stresses/processes we will examine are crowding stress, air-exposure, ammonia exposure, ingestion of large sporadic meals, hypoxia and exercise. Through studies of large numbers of genes, multiple species and multiple stressors, we hope to gain a broader appreciation of the genes that are common to all stresses, the genes that are specific to only some stresses, and more generally how stress acts to change patterns of gene expression in fish.