Journal Article

Reproducibility and Consistency of Proteomic Experiments on Natural Populations of a Non-Model Aquatic Insect

Biron, David G., Monge, Marta, Ribera, Ignacio, Cieslak, Alexandra, Canals, Francesc, Hidalgo-Galiana, Amparo

2014

Overview

Population proteomics has a great potential to address evolutionary and ecological questions, but its use in wild populations of non-model organisms is hampered by uncontrolled sources of variation. Here we compare the response to temperature extremes of two geographically distant populations of a diving beetle species (Agabus ramblae) using 2-D DIGE. After one week of acclimation in the laboratory under standard conditions, a third of the specimens of each population were placed at either 4 or 27°C for 12 h, with another third left as a control. We then compared the protein expression level of three replicated samples of 2-3 specimens for each treatment. Within each population, variation between replicated samples of the same treatment was always lower than variation between treatments, except for some control samples that retained a wider range of expression levels. The two populations had a similar response, without significant differences in the number of protein spots over- or under-expressed in the pairwise comparisons between treatments. We identified exemplary proteins among those differently expressed between treatments, which proved to be proteins known to be related to thermal response or stress. Overall, our results indicate that specimens collected in the wild are suitable for proteomic analyses, as the additional sources of variation were not enough to mask the consistency and reproducibility of the response to the temperature treatments.

• Publisher: Public Library of Science,Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• Subject: Acclimation / Acclimatization / Agabus brunneus / Agabus ramblae / Animals / Aquatic insects / Aquatic populations / Biodiversity / Biology and Life Sciences / Climate change / Coleoptera / Coleoptera - metabolism / Comparative analysis / Consistency / Diving / Earth Sciences / Ecology and Environmental Sciences / Environmental conditions / Evolution / Evolutionary biology / Experiments / Gene Expression / Insect Proteins - genetics / Insect Proteins - metabolism / Insects / Kinases / Laboratories / Life Sciences / Metabolism / Molecular Sequence Annotation / Natural populations / Physiology / Population / Populations / Protein expression / Proteins / Proteome - genetics / Proteome - metabolism / Proteomics / Reproducibility / Reproducibility of Results / Research and Analysis Methods / Temperature / Temperature extremes / Thermal response / Variation