Research Progress in Area 1 方向 ( 一 ) 課題進展 101 Abstract Hong Kong supports extensive coral communities, with a high coral density of at least 84 scleractinian coral species in 28 genera recorded, but they are suffering from the dramatically seasonal fluctuations. With the demonstration of their great resilience to survive in such varying environments, comprehensive understanding about their adaptation mechanism is still lacking. To reveal the underlying mechanism, stony corals Platygyra carnosa, one of the tolerant species, were studied as a model specie. Proteomics techniques will used to investigate the proteomic shifting between the wet season and dry season. Additionally, a thermal stress experiment was performed to investigate the effect of temperature on coral’s phosphoproteome. Research Activities and Progress • Finished the coral in-situ physiological data collection and fragments collection; • Established an efficient proteomic analysis workflow for stony corals (Figure 1); • Detected nearly 8,000 proteins from coral fragments using LC-MS/MS technique and characterized different proteomic profiles of coral host between seasons (Figure 2); • Performed a thermal stress experiment and finished the first phosphoproteome analysis of stony corals. Key Findings • Established an efficient proteomics analysis workflow for reef-building corals; • Discovered that the adaptation of Hong Kong reef-building corals to environmental changes was likely to associatedwith themTOR signaling pathway; • Completed the first analysis of the phosphoproteome of reef-building corals. Research Output Publication 2 Trained personnel 3 Proteomics Investigation of the Physiological Adaptation of Hong Kong Corals Platygyra Carnosa to Natural Environmental Changes Prof. Leo Lai Chan City University of Hong Kong Fig 1. Proteomic analysis workflow for stony corals. Platygyra carnosa LC-MS/MS Analysis Label Free Quantitation Physical extraction Acetone 46 TCA 71 rap 2040 19 308 157 274 Unigene Sequence Reference Database Annotation Digestion & Desalting Protein purification 3 Incubation, homogenization,sonication 1 Incubation 2 Incubation, homogenization Chemical Precipitation Acetone or Trichloroacetic acid Suspension trapping (S-Trap)
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NDk5Njg=