• European Marine Science
• 2019-2023close
• European Commission close
• Wellcome Trust close

The exchange of biological material and data has become an issue of major importance for research in biotechnology. At the same time, many reports indicate problems with quality, trustworthiness and reproducibility of research results, mainly due to poor documentation of data generation or collection of samples. Consequently, there is an urgent need for improved and standardized documentation of data and specimen used in research studies. In response to these issues, we are developing a provenance information standard for the biotechnology domain within the ISO Technical Committee 276 “Biotechnology”. The major objectives of the standard, now registered as ISO/WD 23494, are improved reproducibility of research results, enabling the assessment of the quality of biological samples and data, traceability and higher reliability of observations. We are convinced that the standardization project is of substantial interest to a broader audience, who we would also invite to comment and contribute to this comprehensive effort. Manuscript under consideration.

A functional centrosome is vital for the development and physiology of animals. Among numerous regulatory mechanisms of the centrosome, ubiquitin-mediated proteolysis is known to be critical for the precise regulation of centriole duplication. However, its significance beyond centrosome copy number control remains unclear. Using an in vitro screen for centrosomal substrates of the APC/C ubiquitin ligase in Drosophila, we identify several conserved pericentriolar material (PCM) components, including the inner PCM protein Spd2. We show that Spd2 levels are controlled by the interphase-specific form of APC/C, APC/CFzr , in cultured cells and developing brains. Increased Spd2 levels compromise neural stem cell-specific asymmetric PCM recruitment and microtubule nucleation at interphase centrosomes, resulting in partial randomisation of the division axis and segregation patterns of the daughter centrosome in the following mitosis. We further provide evidence that APC/CFzr -dependent Spd2 degradation restricts the amount and mobility of Spd2 at the daughter centrosome, thereby facilitating the accumulation of Polo-dependent Spd2 phosphorylation for PCM recruitment. Our study underpins the critical role of cell cycle-dependent proteolytic regulation of the PCM in stem cells. Funder: Marie Curie (Marie Curie Cancer Care); Id: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100000654

AbstractMarine phytoplankton play important roles in the global ecosystem, with a limited number of cosmopolitan keystone species driving their biomass. Recent studies have revealed that many of these phytoplankton are complexes composed of sibling species, but little is known about the evolutionary processes underlying their formation. Gephyrocapsa huxleyi, a widely distributed and abundant unicellular marine planktonic algae, produces calcified scales (coccoliths), thereby significantly affects global biogeochemical cycles via sequestration of inorganic carbon. This species is composed of morphotypes defined by differing degrees of coccolith calcification, the evolutionary ecology of which remains unclear. Here, we report an integrated morphological, ecological and genomic survey across globally distributed G. huxleyi strains to reconstruct evolutionary relationships between morphotypes in relation to their habitats. While G. huxleyi has been considered a single cosmopolitan species, our analyses demonstrate that it has evolved to comprise at least three distinct species, which led us to formally revise the taxonomy of the G. huxleyi complex. Moreover, the first speciation event occurred before the onset of the last interglacial period (~140 ka), while the second followed during this interglacial. Then, further rapid diversifications occurred during the most recent ice-sheet expansion of the last glacial period and established morphotypes as dominant populations across environmental clines. These results suggest that glacial-cycle dynamics contributed to the isolation of ocean basins and the segregations of oceans fronts as extrinsic drivers of micro-evolutionary radiations in extant marine phytoplankton.

AbstractThe deep sea is known to host novel bacteria with the potential to produce a diverse array of undiscovered natural products. Understanding these bacteria is thus of broad interest in ecology and could also underpin applied drug discovery, specifically in the area of antimicrobials. Here, we isolate a new strain ofStreptomycesfrom the tissue of the deep-sea spongePolymastia corticatacollected at a depth of 1869 m from the Gramberg seamount in the Atlantic Ocean. This strain, which was given the initial designation A15ISP2-DRY2T, has a genome size of 9.29 Mb with a GC content of 70.83%. Phylogenomics determined that A15ISP2-DRY2Trepresents a novel species within the genusStreptomycesas part of theStreptomyces aurantiacusclade. The biosynthetic potential of A15ISP2-DRY2Twas assessed relative to other members of theaurantiacusclade via comparative gene cluster family (GCF) analysis. This revealed a clear congruent relationship between phylogeny and GCF content. A15ISP2-DRY2Tcontains six unique GCFs absent elsewhere in the clade. Culture-based assays were used to demonstrate the antibacterial activity of A15ISP2-DRY2Tagainst two drug-resistant human pathogens. We thus determine A15ISP2-DRY2Tto be a novel bacterial species with considerable biosynthetic potential and propose the systematic nameStreptomyces ortussp. nov.Impact StatementTheStreptomycesgenus has contributed more to our antibiotic arsenal than any other group of bacteria or fungi. Despite decades of exploration, global analysis has suggested they still possess more undiscovered biosynthetic diversity than any other bacterial group. Isolating novel species ofStreptomycesis therefore a priority for antibiotic discovery. Here we isolate a novel strain from a deep-sea sponge and use comparative cluster analysis to identify six biosynthetic clusters unique to our deep-sea strain. This work demonstrates the utility of continuing to isolate novelStreptomycesstrains for antibiotic discovery and, for the first time, we used species tree-gene cluster tree reconciliation to assess the contribution of vertical evolution on the biosynthetic gene cluster content ofStreptomyces.

AbstractThe costs and benefits of being social vary with environmental conditions, so individuals must weigh the balance between these trade‐offs in response to changes in the environment. Temperature is a salient environmental factor that may play a key role in altering the costs and benefits of sociality through its effects on food availability, predator abundance, and other ecological parameters. In ectotherms, changes in temperature also have direct effects on physiological traits linked to social behaviour, such as metabolic rate and locomotor performance. In light of climate change, it is therefore important to understand the potential effects of temperature on sociality. Here, we took the advantage of a ‘natural experiment’ of threespine sticklebacks from contrasting thermal environments in Iceland: geothermally warmed water bodies (warm habitats) and adjacent ambient‐temperature water bodies (cold habitats) that were either linked (sympatric) or physically distinct (allopatric). We first measured the sociability of wild‐caught adult fish from warm and cold habitats after acclimation to a low and a high temperature. At both acclimation temperatures, fish from the allopatric warm habitat were less social than those from the allopatric cold habitat, whereas fish from sympatric warm and cold habitats showed no differences in sociability. To determine whether differences in sociability between thermal habitats in the allopatric population were heritable, we used a common garden breeding design where individuals from the warm and the cold habitat were reared at a low or high temperature for two generations. We found that sociability was indeed heritable but also influenced by rearing temperature, suggesting that thermal conditions during early life can play an important role in influencing social behaviour in adulthood. By providing the first evidence for a causal effect of rearing temperature on social behaviour, our study provides novel insights into how a warming world may influence sociality in animal populations.

AbstractProvenance is information describing the lineage of an object, such as a dataset or biological material. Since these objects can be passed between organizations, each organization can document only parts of the objects life cycle. As a result, interconnection of distributed provenance parts forms distributed provenance chains. Dependant on the actual provenance content, complete provenance chains can provide traceability and contribute to reproducibility and FAIRness of research objects. In this paper, we define a lightweight provenance model based on W3C PROV that enables generation of distributed provenance chains in complex, multi-organizational environments. The application of the model is demonstrated with a use case spanning several steps of a real-world research pipeline — starting with the acquisition of a specimen, its processing and storage, histological examination, and the generation/collection of associated data (images, annotations, clinical data), ending with training an AI model for the detection of tumor in the images. The proposed model has become an open conceptual foundation of the currently developed ISO 23494 standard on provenance for biotechnology domain.

Obesity is a world wide problem and evidence suggests, that early lifetime undernourishment of caloric restirction predispose an organism for obesity and metabolic syndrome. We have raised two cohorts of zebrafish in an obesogenic environment (DIO) and compared several metabolic markers with fish raised under caloric restriction (CR) or fish shifted from CR to DIO at different periods in their life. We have looked morphologically at standard length and weight and found that fish on DIO grow faster in both axes. Fish shifted from CR to DIO show catch-up growth and not compensatory growth when shifted at one month, 3 months or 9 months of age. We have further characterized central agrp expression and hyperphagia, adipose tissue by histology as well as uCT imaging, hepatic histology, metabolic rate mitochondrial function as well as feeding induced glucose levels. We find that fish in an obesogenic environment develop markers of obesity which are not exacerbated by ealry lifetime food restriction.

For µCT imaging, adult zebrafish were fixed and decalcified in Bouin's solution at room temperature for 7 days, stored in PBS and imaged using a micro-computed tomography (µCT) device (SkyScan1272, Bruker BioSpin GmbH, Ettlingen, Germany). Zebrafish were placed individually in 1.5ml Eppendorf tubes using and an ultra-focus scan over the whole body was performed in a full-rotation in step-and-shoot mode. 322 projections (1008x672 pixels, 4x4 binning) were acquired per subscan with an x-ray tube voltage of 60 kV, power 0.166 mA, aluminum filter 0.25 mm,exposure time of 363 ms, 6 averages and a object-source distance of 86 mm. All CT images were reconstructed at an isotropic voxel size of 18 µm using a Feldkamp type algorithm (filtered back-projection). Fat-containing regions were appear hypo intense in µCT data and were segmented using Imalytics Preclinical (Gremse-IT GmbH, Aachen, Germany (Gremse et al., 2016; doi:10.7150/thno.13624). The volumetric fat percentage was calculated as the ratio of subcutaneous adipose tissue (SAT) or visceral adipose tissue (VAT) fat volume compared to the entire volume of the body cavity anterior of the anal fin and expressed per skeletal segment. Fish were raised as previously reported (Leibold and Hammerschmidt, 2015) for the following conditions:CG1: compensatory or catch up growth shifted at 1 month of ageCG3: compensatory or catch up growth shifted at 3 months of ageCG9: compensatory or catch up growth shifted at 9 months of ageCR: caloric restrictionDIO: diet induced obesityThe CT .nii files correlate to the groups as follows: Group 2: CG1; Group 3: DIO1; Group 6: CG3; Group 7 DIO3; Group 10: CG9; Group 11: DIO9; Group 1: CR1; Group 5: CR3; Group 9: CR9