How good are invasive crayfish facing in a changing world? An evolutionary study based on proteomics

Abstract

Invasive species are often able to cope with variety environmental conditions enabling them to expand to new habitats. Once introduced and successfully established those invasive species, often threaten native species in their ecosystems. New environmental conditions may act as selective pressures that drive organismal adaptation and evolution. However, alongside genetic adaptation, invasive organisms also show a high degree of plasticity in response to environmental challenge. To elucidate whether epigenetic mechanisms allow an organism to respond to the environment, we study how individuals of two invasive crayfish species respond to environmental challenges by means of a cutting-edge proteomic approach. Our objective is to investigate which types of proteins and how many of each type are expressed when individuals are exposed to different environmental conditions. Our target species are two invasive crayfish, i.e. the red swamp crayfish, Procambarus clarkii; and the parthenogenetic marbled crayfish, Procambarus fallax f. virginalis. The use of a parthenogenetic species will allow us to assess whether changes in protein expression are uniquely due to plasticity (as individuals are genetically identical). We conduct an experiment in which we expose the two crayfish species to treatments consisting of different combinations of temperature and water velocity for several days. After exposure, individuals will be collected and immediately subjected to tissue extraction from the muscle, gills and hepatopancreas to examine the proteome responses. Here, we will present the details of the experimental setup and hypotheses tested as well as any available results.