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Sea turtle Immunogenetics

Sea turtles play indispensable roles in marine ecosystems including maintaining productive coral reefs and transporting essential nutrients from the oceans to beaches and coastal dunes. But their populations globally are in danger of extinction due to a viral tumour-causing disease called fibropapillomatosis (FP) whose incidence is associated with human impacts on the foraging locations. Of the turtle species, the green sea turtles (Chelonia mydas) are the most affected by the disease. In Kenya for instance, it is anecdotally reported that nearly all green sea turtles unintentionally caught by fishers have tumours. The reason for this is not known which raises the need to investigate whether there is a genetic basis. To accomplish this, the mini project will utilize reads (to be provided) of the immune gene (MHC) sequenced by Sanger from tumoured and non-tumoured Kenyan sea turtles. Additional sequences will be obtained from public repositories to allow for description and comparison of immunogenetic diversity between the Kenya and global sea turtles.

References

  1. Aguirre, A. A., & Lutz, P. (2004). Marine Turtles as Sentinels of Ecosystem Health: Is Fibropapillomatosis an Indicator? EcoHealth, 1(3), 275–283. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10393-004-0097-3
  2. Bjorkman, P. J., & Parham, P. (1990). Structure, function, and diversity of class I major histocompatibility complex molecules. In Annual Review of Biochemistry (Vol. 59). https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.bi.59.070190.001345
  3. Bowen, B. W., & Karl, S. A. (2007). Population genetics and phylogeography of sea turtles. Molecular Ecology, 16(23), 4886–4907. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-294X.2007.03542.x
  4. Stiebens, V. A., Merino, S. E., Chain, F. J. J., & Eizaguirre, C. (2013). Evolution of MHC class I genes in the endangered loggerhead sea turtle (Caretta caretta) revealed by 454 amplicon sequencing. BMC Evolutionary Biology, 13(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2148-13-95
  5. Ujvari, B., & Belov, K. (2011). Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC) Markers in Conservation Biology. International Journal of Molecular Sciences, 12(8), 5168–5186. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms12085168