TY - JOUR A1 - Grohme, Markus A1 - Mali, Brahim A1 - Wełnicz, Weronika A1 - Michel, Stephanie A1 - Schill, Ralph O. A1 - Frohme, Marcus T1 - The Aquaporin Channel Repertoire of the Tardigrade Milnesium tardigradum JF - Bioinformatics and Biology Insights N2 - Limno-terrestrial tardigrades are small invertebrates that are subjected to periodic drought of their micro-environment. They have evolved to cope with these unfavorable conditions by anhydrobiosis, an ametabolic state of low cellular water. During drying and rehydration, tardigrades go through drastic changes in cellular water content. By our transcriptome sequencing effort of the limno-terrestrial tardigrade Milnesium tardigradum and by a combination of cloning and targeted sequence assembly, we identified transcripts encoding eleven putative aquaporins. Analysis of these sequences proposed 2 classical aquaporins, 8 aquaglyceroporins and a single potentially intracellular unorthodox aquaporin. Using quantitative real-time PCR we analyzed aquaporin transcript expression in the anhydrobiotic context. We have identified additional unorthodox aquaporins in various insect genomes and have identified a novel common conserved structural feature in these proteins. Analysis of the genomic organization of insect aquaporin genes revealed several conserved gene clusters. KW - unorthodox aquaporin KW - anhydrobiosis KW - tardigrade Y1 - 2013 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:526-opus4-6092 SN - 1177-9322 VL - 2013 IS - 7 SP - 153 EP - 165 ER -