Prioritised expression of stress-related proteins in environmental thermoadaptive responses of animals

气候如何影响自然种群的假设和模型的基础是对预测的温度变化如何影响特定栖息地、地区或气候带中物种的生活史、繁殖力、生存等的预期。这些模型的一个重要组成部分是了解动物物种如何很好地调整它们的身体，以响应持续的环境信号，如季节或每天的温度波动，从而保护自己免受意外的冷热冲击的伤害。了解潜在的保护需要了解在细胞、组织和整个身体水平上诱导的基本机制，这些机制与改变对环境压力的抵抗力有关。在过去的15年里，关于动物如何与热环境相互作用的研究取得了巨大进展。基因组科学的进步现在提供了对动物热特性的“全球化”测量，这意味着同时评估其所有组成基因和蛋白质。这种全系统分析已成为分析生物系统特性和反应的关键工具，其结果已为生物学的许多不同领域提供了信息。但这项技术仍在不断发展和进步。早期的技术已经让位于新的方法，这些方法可以提供更详细、更快、成本更低的全貌。这些新技术，主要基于非常高通量的DNA测序，最近被用于提供许多不同种类的信息。其中一项技术使我们能够量化组织中对环境突然变化（如温度）做出反应的蛋白质的数量，并提高动物在困难时期的生存能力。识别这些反应的基因和蛋白质告诉我们很多关于动物如何提高其生存机会的信息，否则它可能无法生存。它还告诉我们哪些问题是由温度冲击引起的，以及如何解决或减轻这些问题。我们的项目将应用一种新技术来解决这个众所周知的环境问题，即鱼类如何在极端寒流中生存，这种寒流在淡水栖息地非常严重，有时会导致大量鱼类死亡。然而，如果让鱼“尝到”冷水的味道，预示着更极端的温度可能会发生，它可以让自己的身体和组织做好准备，这样极端的寒冷就不会对它们造成那么大的伤害。因此，我们希望准确地定义导致衰弱和死亡的原因，以及动物如何通过预适应凉爽来保护自己免受极端的、使人衰弱的寒冷。但是，了解这些动物的基本机制将提供具有更广泛意义的信息。对寒冷的反应包括在大多数（如果不是全部的话）动物体内工作的基因和蛋白质，这使它们能够对寒冷以外的压力源做出反应。一个很好的例子是，鱼类和冬眠哺乳动物中的冷休克蛋白已被证明可以保护小鼠模型中的中枢神经系统免受神经退行性疾病引起的破坏。我们将提取普通鲤鱼从夏季温度冷却到冬季温度前后的组织，并“全面”测量冷却后立即产生的数千种新蛋白质的数量和身份。这一新知识将直接指向相应的基因和它们编码的蛋白质。我们还将关注一组特定的基因，这些基因的蛋白质已知在寒冷中高度表达。我们将验证这种观点，即这些蛋白质有助于保护细胞的DNA和RNA免受寒冷造成的结构缺陷。

Underpinning the assumptions and models of how climate will affect natural populations are expectations of how the predicted temperature change affects the life history, fecundity, survival etc. of species in a given habitat, region or climatic zone. An important component of such models is knowledge of how well animal species can modify their bodies in response to persistent environmental signals, such as seasons or daily temperature fluctuations, and thereby to protect themselves from the debilitation by unexpected cold and heat snaps. Understanding the potential for protection requires an understanding of the fundamental mechanisms induced at the level of cell, tissue and whole body and which correlate with altered resistance to environmental stress.Research into how animals interact with their thermal environment has progressed enormously in the past 15 years. Advances in genomic science now offers 'globalised' measurement of thermal properties of animals, meaning simultaneous assessment of all of its constituent genes and proteins. This whole-system profiling has emerged as a key tool for analysing the properties and responses of biological systems, and the outcomes have informed many different areas of biology. But the technology continues to evolve and advance. Earlier techniques have given way to new approaches that give the whole picture, with more detail, faster, and for less cost. These new techniques, mainly based on very high-throughput DNA sequencing, have recently been adapted to provide many different kinds of information. One of these techniques allows us to quantify the number of proteins being made in tissues that are responding to sudden changes in their circumstances, such as temperature, and which improve the ability of animals to survive difficult times. Identifying the genes and proteins that respond tells us a lot about how the animal improves its life chances, when otherwise it might not survive. It also tells us which problems are caused by temperature shock and how these problems are resolved or mitigated.Our project will apply a new technique to this well-understood environmental problem, which is how a fish survives extreme cold snaps, which can be so severe in freshwater habitats that fish are killed, sometimes in large numbers. Yet, if the fish were given a 'taste' of cool waters signalling the likely occurrance of more extreme temperatures it can prepare its body and tissues such that extreme cold isn't so damaging. So we wish to define exactly what causes debilitation and death, and how the animals protects itself from extreme, debilitating cold by preconditioning to cool. But understanding the fundamental mechanisms operating in these animals will provide information of much broader significance. The responses to cold include genes and proteins working in most, if not all, animals, which gives them an ability to respond to stressors other than cold. A good example is how a cold shock protein in fish and hibernating mammals has been shown to protect the central nervous system in mouse models from disruption caused by neurodegenerative disease.We will extract tissues of the common carp before and after they have been cooled from a summer temperature to a winter temperature, and 'globally' measure the number and identity of thousands of new proteins created immediately after cooling. This new knowledge will point directly to responding genes and the proteins they encode. We will also focus on a particular group of genes whose proteins are already known to be highly expressed in the cold. We will test the idea that these proteins help protect the DNA and RNA of cells from structural imperfections caused by cold.