The physiological ecology of copepods: molecular approaches.

Tow a plankton net in a body of sea water and chances are it will catch copepods. Ubiquitous, abundant, diverse, and prey to many organisms, their importance in marine ecosystems is not in question. Because of their small size and their vast 3-dimensional habitats, copepods are poor models for physiological studies, and we know surprisingly little about their organismal biology. However, molecular techniques, such as those that quantify gene expression, have opened doors for generating snapshots of all the messages (mRNA) produced by the cells that control the animal’s life processes. My group has been exploring the challenges, opportunities and limitations of transcriptomics to quantify gene expression in individual copepods. In this talk, I will focus on how one sub-arctic copepod is able to acclimatize to conditions that are both cyclical and unpredictable at the individual level.