The porcelain crab transcriptome and PCAD, the porcelain crab microarray and sequence database.

Background: With the emergence of a completed genome sequence of the freshwater crustacean Daphnia pulex, construction of genomic-scale sequence databases for additional crustacean sequences are important for comparative genomics and annotation. Porcelain crabs, genus Petrolisthes, have been powerful crustacean models for environmental and evolutionary physiology with respect to thermal adaptation and understanding responses of marine organisms to climate change. Here, we present a large-scale EST sequencing and cDNA microarray database project for the porcelain crab Petrolisthes cinctipes.

A cDNA microarray analysis of the response to heat stress in hepatopancreas tissue of the porcelain crab Petrolisthes cinctipes.

Intertidal zone organisms experience thermal stress during periods of low tide, and much work has shown that induction of heat shock proteins and ubiquitination occurs in response to this stress. However, less is known of other cellular pathways that are regulated following thermal stress in these organisms. Here, we used a functional genomics approach to identify genes that were up- and downregulated following heat stress in the intertidal porcelain crab, Petrolisthes cinctipes using custom cDNA microarrays made from 13,824 cloned P.

Construction and characterization of EST libraries from the porcelain crab, Petrolisthes cinctipes.

The thermal phenotype of an organism (heat and cold tolerance, thermal range, and thermal plasticity) is an essential feature of how the organism performs across thermal environments and in response to thermal stress. Porcelain crabs are of interest in addressing questions of thermal phenotype because of their high species diversity and the large variation in thermal phenotype among species, as well as the biogeographic patterning of these crabs along environmental stress gradients. We are studying the cellular bases of thermal phenotype and physiological responses to environmental stress using a functional genomics cDNA microarray approach.