Developing Aiptasia pallida as a tractable model system for cnidarian-dinoflagellate symbiosis : identifying transferred metabolites and designing tools for analysis of ultra-high-throughput-sequencing data

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Abstract/Contents

Abstract
This dissertation describes a general method for identifying and roughly quantifying the metabolites that are produced by symbiotic dinoflagellates and transferred to cnidarian hosts. I developed a system of rapid filtration and gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) to identify these compounds in the anemone tissue and dinoflagellates separately. I used 13C-sodium bicarbonate to label compounds produced from newly-fixed carbon; the principal compound detected in the animal was glucose. I developed a way to visualize these and other large GC-MS datasets using open-source software. I also built tools for analyzing Ultra-High-Throughput-Sequencing (UHTS) data, and these were useful in the de novo assembly of the Aiptasia pallida transcriptome. One tool I developed compares each read to each other read using a MapReduce framework to merge near-duplicate reads and reduce redundancy in the dataset. In addition, our lab sequenced symbiotic animals and therefore often worked with pools of sequences from multiple organisms. I developed a tool for identifying which transcript sequence was produced by which organism in a symbiotic ecosystem: it was 99% accurate on high-quality validation data.

Description

Type of resource text
Form electronic; electronic resource; remote
Extent 1 online resource.
Publication date 2011
Issuance monographic
Language English

Creators/Contributors

Associated with Burriesci, Matthew Strecker
Associated with Stanford University, Department of Genetics
Primary advisor Pringle, John
Thesis advisor Pringle, John
Thesis advisor Altman, Russ
Thesis advisor Long, Sharon
Thesis advisor Sherlock, Gavin
Advisor Altman, Russ
Advisor Long, Sharon
Advisor Sherlock, Gavin

Subjects

Genre Theses

Bibliographic information

Statement of responsibility Matthew Strecker Burriesci.
Note Submitted to the Department of Genetics.
Thesis Thesis (Ph. D.)--Stanford University, 2011.
Location electronic resource

Access conditions

Copyright
© 2011 by Matthew Strecker Burriesci

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