Enrique Gonzalez Tortuero
Faculty of Biology of the Ludwig-Maximilien-UniversityDepartment Biology II
Evolutionsökologie
Grosshaderner Strasse 2
Planegg-Martinsried, 82512
Germany
Abstracts (first author)
Bioinformatic analysis of amplicon sequencing data to study spatial and temporal variation in a Daphnia microparasite
Summary:
Caullerya mesnili (Opisthokonta, Ichthyosporea) is an endoparasite infecting Daphnia (Crustacea, Cladocera) gut. This protozoan has high virulence and a strong genetic specificity for the infection, thus it seems to be a good model to study host-parasite coevolution dynamics. However, little is known about population structure of this microparasite. Previous work based on cloned sequences has shown that variation of the ITS region (internal transcribed spacer of ribosomal DNA) can be used to analyse spatial and temporal variation in C. mesnili. However, high-throughput next generation sequencing (NGS) allows much larger scale analyses. In this work we will present a bioinformatic pipeline analysing 392 bp long ITS amplicons from Caullerya obtained from 454 pyrosequencing. With this approach, it is possible to study in detail aspects such as the spatio-temporal distribution of Caullerya in different host populations or clones. We will also demonstrate the comparison of patterns obtained by cloning with the NGS approach.
