Metabolic responses of sea anemone and jellyfish to temperature and UV bleaching: Insights into stress adaptation using LCMS-based metabolomics, molecular networking and chemometrics.

Introduction: Climate change poses various threats to marine life, particularly in shallow tropical waters.

Objective: The impact of increased temperature and ultraviolet (UV) exposure on two photosymbiotic cnidarians, a common bubble-tip anemone and an upside-down jellyfish, was investigated.

Methods: To illustrate the response of aquatic organisms, the metabolomes of unstressed Entacmaea quadricolor and Cassiopea andromeda were compared for detailed metabolite profiling.

Simultaneous ocean acidification and warming do not alter the lipid-associated biochemistry but induce enzyme activities in an asterinid starfish.

Ocean acidification and warming affect marine ecosystems from the molecular scale in organismal physiology to broad alterations of ecosystem functions. However, knowledge of their combined effects on tropical-subtropical intertidal species remains limited. Pushing the environmental range of marine species away from the optimum initiates stress impacting biochemical metabolic characteristics, with consequences on lipid-associated and enzyme biochemistry.

Nanoplastic incorporation into an organismal skeleton.

Studies on the effects of global marine plastic pollution have largely focused on physiological responses of few organism groups (e.g., corals, fishes).

Ecosystem design as an avenue for improving services provided by carbonate producing marine ecosystems.

Ecosystem Design (ED) is an approach for constructing habitats that places human needs for ecosystem services at the center of intervention, with the overarching goal of establishing self-sustaining habitats which require limited management. This concept was originally developed for use in mangrove ecosystems, and is understandably controversial, as it markedly diverges from other protection approaches that assign human use a minor priority or exclude it. However, the advantage of ED lies within the considered implementation of these designed ecosystems, thus preserving human benefits from potential later disturbances.

Diversity and flexibility of algal symbiont community in globally distributed larger benthic foraminifera of the genus Amphistegina.

Background: Understanding the specificity and flexibility of the algal symbiosis-host association is fundamental for predicting how species occupy a diverse range of habitats. Here we assessed the algal symbiosis diversity of three species of larger benthic foraminifera from the genus Amphistegina and investigated the role of habitat and species identity in shaping the associated algal community.

Results: We used next-generation sequencing to identify the associated algal community, and DNA barcoding to identify the diatom endosymbionts associated with species of A.

High dispersal capacity and biogeographic breaks shape the genetic diversity of a globally distributed reef-dwelling calcifier.

Understanding the role of dispersal and adaptation in the evolutionary history of marine species is essential for predicting their response to changing conditions. We analyzed patterns of genetic differentiation in the key tropical calcifying species of large benthic foraminifera to reveal the evolutionary processes responsible for its biogeographic distribution. We collected specimens from 16 sites encompassing the entire range of the species and analyzed hypervariable fragments of the 18S SSU rDNA marker.

Putative sponge biomarkers in unicellular Rhizaria question an early rise of animals.

The dawn of animals remains one of the most mysterious milestones in the evolution of life. The fossil lipids 24-isopropylcholestane and 26-methylstigmastane are considered diagnostic for demosponges-arguably the oldest group of living animals. The widespread occurrence and high relative abundance of these biomarkers in Ediacaran sediments from 635-541 million years (Myr) ago have been viewed as evidence for the rise of animals to ecological importance approximately 100 Myr before their rapid Cambrian radiation.

Disentangling thermal stress responses in a reef-calcifier and its photosymbionts by shotgun proteomics.

The proliferation of key marine ecological engineers and carbonate producers often relies on their association with photosymbiotic algae. Evaluating stress responses of these organisms is important to predict their fate under future climate projections. Physiological approaches are limited in their ability to resolve the involved molecular mechanisms and attribute stress effects to the host or symbiont, while probing and partitioning of proteins cannot be applied in organisms where the host and symbiont are small and cannot be physically separated.

Reef calcifiers are adapted to episodic heat stress but vulnerable to sustained warming.

Shallow marine ecosystems naturally experience fluctuating physicochemical conditions across spatial and temporal scales. Widespread coral-bleaching events, induced by prolonged heat stress, highlight the importance of how the duration and frequency of thermal stress influence the adaptive physiology of photosymbiotic calcifiers. Large benthic foraminifera harboring algal endosymbionts are major tropical carbonate producers and bioindicators of ecosystem health.

DISMS2: A flexible algorithm for direct proteome- wide distance calculation of LC-MS/MS runs.

Background: The classification of samples on a molecular level has manifold applications, from patient classification regarding cancer treatment to phylogenetics for identifying evolutionary relationships between species. Modern methods employ the alignment of DNA or amino acid sequences, mostly not genome-wide but only on selected parts of the genome. Recently proteomics-based approaches have become popular.