TY - JOUR A1 - Förster, Frank A1 - Beisser, Daniela A1 - Grohme, Markus A1 - Liang, Chunguang A1 - Mali, Brahim A1 - Siegl, Alexander Matthias A1 - Engelmann, Julia C. A1 - Shkumatov, Alexander A1 - Schokraie, Elham A1 - Müller, Tobias A1 - Schnölzer, Martina A1 - Schill, Ralph O. A1 - Frohme, Marcus A1 - Dandekar, Thomas T1 - Transcriptome Analysis in Tardigrade Species Reveals Specific Molecular Pathways for Stress Adaptations JF - Bioinformatics and Biology Insights N2 - Tardigrades have unique stress-adaptations that allow them to survive extremes of cold, heat, radiation and vacuum. To study this, encoded protein clusters and pathways from an ongoing transcriptome study on the tardigrade Milnesium tardigradum were analyzed using bioinformatics tools and compared to expressed sequence tags (ESTs) from Hypsibius dujardini, revealing major pathways involved in resistance against extreme environmental conditions. ESTs are available on the Tardigrade Workbench along with software and databank updates. Our analysis reveals that RNA stability motifs for M. tardigradum are different from typical motifs known from higher animals. M. tardigradum and H. dujardini protein clusters and conserved domains imply metabolic storage pathways for glycogen, glycolipids and specific secondary metabolism as well as stress response pathways (including heat shock proteins, bmh2, and specific repair pathways). Redox-, DNA-, stress- and protein protection pathways complement specific repair capabilities to achieve the strong robustness of M. tardigradum. These pathways are partly conserved in other animals and their manipulation could boost stress adaptation even in human cells. However, the unique combination of resistance and repair pathways make tardigrades and M. tardigradum in particular so highly stress resistant. KW - RNA KW - expressed sequence tag KW - cluster KW - protein family KW - adaptation KW - tardigrade KW - transcriptome Y1 - 2012 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:526-opus4-6153 SN - 1177-9322 VL - 2012 IS - 6 SP - 69 EP - 96 ER -