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Content archived on 2024-05-29

EXPRESSED SEQUENCE TAGS (ESTS) OF TOXIC ALGAE

Objective

Harmful algal blooms (HABs) are caused by local proliferation of algae, with deleteriousconsequences, particularly in coastal waters throughout the world. Negativeenvironmental effects include toxicity to human consumers of seafood, marine faunalmortalities or morbidity, habitat damage, disruption of marine food webs and economiclosses to fishing, aquaculture, and tourism. In Europe, socio-economic factors andhuman health risk have led to comprehensive surveillance programmes for harmfulmicroalgae and their toxins. Among harmful microalgae and cyanobacteria in Europeanmarine and brackish waters, many produce potent neurotoxins, ichthyotoxins orhepatotoxins. Although structural elucidation of many of these groups of toxins hasadvanced, much less is known about biosynthetic pathways and gene regulation intoxigenic species. We propose a limited genomic study of expressed sequence tags(ESTs) for toxigenic representatives of major eukaryotic microalgal groups, includingdinoflagellates, raphidophytes, prymnesiophytes and diatoms, and cyanobacteria.Cultures will be grown under various environmental conditions to investigate the effectsof external forcing functions on gene expression linked to toxicity and growth. Aftercloning of cDNA of toxigenic strains pooled from cultures grown under these differentconditions into plasmid vectors, about 10,000 clones from each taxon will be randomlysequenced for ESTs. Our approach is to annotate ESTs and attempt identification ofgenes associated with toxin production, growth regulation, cell cycle, stress responsesand induction of sexuality. DNA microarrays will be developed for analyse the geneexpression of the differently treated cultures. Successful completion of this project willyield new information on microalgal and cyanobacterial genomic sequences for adiversity of taxa and will assist in the diagnosis of genes related to toxin biosynthesis.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

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Keywords

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Topic(s)

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Call for proposal

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FP6-2003-GLOBAL-2
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Funding Scheme

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STREP - Specific Targeted Research Project

Coordinator

STIFTUNG ALFRED WEGENER INSTITUT FÜR POLAR UND MEERESCHFORSCHUNG
EU contribution
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Total cost

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Participants (5)

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