Undergrad_Book_16-18_Pge_View_Print_no print marks_compressed

Selected Projects 2016-18
Figure 1. Gel showing the results of degenerate PCR searching for SIAT7 in springers damselfish (chrisyptera springeri, CSP) and clarks
clownfish (amphiprion clarkia, ACL) genomic (gDNA) and skin cDNA samples
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their transcriptomes to see if it was present or not.
If SIAT7 was present, I would get a gene sequence
from the transcriptomes.
To do this a reference gene was identified from
the bicolor damselfish (Stegastes partitus;
XP_008298796.1). This reference gene was used to
find matching sequences from the transcriptomes
of the study species using Local BLAST. I found that
SIAT7 appeared in all species transcriptomes that
were checked. From this, I could say that SIAT7 is
found in both symbiotic and non-symbiotic species
of fish. However, the specific tissue or tissues it is
expressed in and to what extent was not known from
this information.
After going back to look at the specific gene sequences
that were used to make the primers, there
was evidence that SIAT7 across these species may
be paralogs. Paralogs are genes that have evolved
by duplication events, resulting in two copies of the
gene in different locations of the genome. After
duplication, these copies evolve independently, accumulating
different mutations. After a long period,
these paralogs may still encode for the same protein
but can have very different DNA sequences. This is
interesting to note because it could be evidence that
clownfish symbiosis caused this duplication event to
occur. We found paralogs in the Clarks clownfish but
not in the other three species we tested, which were