Identifying transcriptomic indicators of growth rate and environmental stress in marine phytoplankton

海洋浮游植物是一个极其多样化的生物群体，它们在地球上进行大约一半的光合作用，并在碳循环中发挥关键作用。预计气候变暖会对环境条件产生巨大影响，从而影响海洋浮游植物群落的生产力和分类组成。浮游植物的多样性和复杂的进化历史提出了挑战，谁寻求项目的变化，浮游植物生产力和浮游植物地理学和随后的影响地球化学响应气候变暖的建模。数以千计的浮游生物物种通常被分为几个功能类型，这些功能类型以少数受数据约束的生态和生理特征为特征。转录组学可用于监测浮游植物群落的基因表达，并为我们提供了一个更机械的理解如何以及为什么不同的浮游植物物种和/或功能群响应不断变化的环境条件。在这里，我们建议确定差异表达的基因与生长速度和适应几种环境条件下不同的时间尺度，从短暂的应用程序的一个新的环境条件多代驯化，在几个生态上重要的海洋浮游植物类群在控制实验室培养。这项工作将使我们能够识别与浮游植物生长速率和适应环境条件相关的通用转录组信号，并将提供一个数据库的开端，该数据库可用于解释从该领域获得的越来越多的海洋浮游植物元转录组，并有助于识别定义浮游植物功能组的关键性状的遗传基础，用于下一代生物地球化学模型。

Marine phytoplankton are an extremely diverse group of organisms that perform about half the photosynthesis on Earth and play a key role in the carbon cycle. Climate warming is expected have dramatic effects on environmental conditions that influence both the productivity and taxonomic composition of marine phytoplankton communities. The diversity and complex evolutionary history of the phytoplankton presents challenges for modelers who seek to project changes to phytoplankton productivity and biogeography and subsequent impacts on biogeochemistry in response to climate warming. Thousands of plankton species are routinely grouped into a few functional types, that are distinguished by a small number of ecological and physiological traits that that are poorly constrained by data. Transcriptomics can be used to monitor gene expression of phytoplankton communities in situ and provide us with a much more mechanistic understanding of how and why different phytoplankton species and/or functional groups respond to changing environmental conditions. Here we propose to identify differentially expressed genes associated with growth rate and with acclimation to several environmental conditions under different time-scales from transient application of a new environmental condition to multi-generation acclimation, across several ecologically important marine phytoplankton taxa in controlled lab cultures. This work will allow us to identify universal transcriptomic signals associated with phytoplankton growth rate and acclimation to environmental conditions, and will provide the beginnings of a database that can be used to interpret the increasing number of marine phytoplankton metatranscriptomes taken from the field, and facilitate the identification of the genetic bases of key traits that define phytoplankton functional groups for next-generation biogeochemical models.