Team:Georgia State/Description
Project Inspiration and Description
NEW: Bronze Medal Criterion #4
The inspiration behind our project was the Netflix documentary “Chasing Coral.” At a glance we want to transform the microalgal symbiote of coral, Symbiodinium to overcome the overarching issue of coral bleaching. We first did some research into seeing what causes corals to bleach and consequently die off. As it turns out, there isn’t just one reason but coral bleaching is a result of a multitude of different anthropogenic dependent environmental issues. But before we can even think about what gene we’d like to introduce to combat coral bleaching, we need to look to see if there have previously been any attempts to transform Symbiodinium. We found that there have been two successful transformations of symbiodinium, one in 1998 and another in 2015 however after transformation the cells were left unable to reproduce or photosynthesize. We reached out to the lab that successfully transformed symbiodinium in 2015 and asked them if we could use their plasmid construct pCB302-gfp-MBD, even though it was not optimized to be used in a dinoflagellate. We found another paper “Nuclear gene transformation in a dinoflagellate” where they assembled a dinoflagellate optimized plasmid (DinoIII) and successfully transformed it into Oxyhrris marina. We plan to use their plasmid and replace the green fluorescent protein gene with a codon optimized red fluorescent protein gene. In the lab we plan to culture Oxyhrris marina (a heterotrophic dinoflagellate), Symbiodinium microadriaticum, and Dunaliella tertiolecta (the food source for O. marina). Then we will harvest the Symbiodinium cells and attempt to repeat the transformation done in “Heterologous DNA Uptake in Cultured Symbiodinium spp. Aided by Agrobacterium tumefaciens” with equivalent or better transformation efficiency to generate a successful transformation protocol for Symbiodinium. Once we have created the DinoIII plasmid with codon optimized rfp, we will transform it into Symbiodinium as well.
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References
Literature Heterologous DNA Uptake in Cultured Symbiodinium spp. Aided by Agrobacterium tumefaciens DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0132693 Nuclear gene transformation in a dinoflagellate doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/602821
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