Halftime seminar with PhD student Emil Karlsson, Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences
At the seminar, Emil will talk about diatomes, one of the most diverse groups of plant plankton that stands for circa 20 % of the global primary production, see more below.
Opponent at the seminar is Carina Bunse, Department of Marine Sciences, GU and examiner Henrik Aronsson, Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences. Emil’s main supervisor is Adrian Clarke (BioEnv).
Abstract
The first ever large-scale diatom phenomics screen was carried out on S. marinoi and involved the creation of a tagged mutant library using random insertions. This collection was then subjected to temperature alteration experiments to identify mutants (and therefore genes) involved in temperature acclimatization and multiple interesting mutants were identified. Among them was the mutant strain SM127 that showed a deteriorated ability to acclimatize to lower temperatures but an improved ability to acclimatize when it came to higher temperatures compared with the R05AC wild type strain. The gene disrupted in this mutant was determined to be a novel putative chloroplast-localized fatty acid transporter (FAT1) with sequences identified as being highly similar to substrate location of FA-binding proteins and a transporter domain similar to P-type ATPases. Yet, the precise identity of the substrate that is being transported by FAT1 remains unknown, as does its role in fatty acid biosynthesis and metabolism more broadly.