Research Objectives:
Despite temperatures that can dip below 0°C, antarctic waters provide a life sustaining environment for a number of fish species. How are they able to take the most frigid waters on earth through their gills without themselves freezing? A primary reason are the so-called antifreeze proteins, an adaptation found in a number of polar and subpolar species. The Southern Ocean provides the ideal laboratory and molecular biology the ideal probe to study this phenomenon.
This group studies the physiology of fish and larvae from these waters to see how ice grows in biological tissues -- a crystallization process called nucleation -- and how antifreeze glycoproteins (AFGP) inhibit it. The antifreeze function has enabled the antarctic notothenioids to colonize their frigid habitats very successfully. These researchers are mounting comprehensive multidisciplinary analyses of this adaptation at the level of the gene as well as the protein.
This season, deploying team members will:
+ Investigate the relationship between the severity of different antarctic marine environments (McMurdo vs. Peninsula) on notothenoid fish antifreeze capacity and function.
+ Characterize the antifreeze capacity at both the gene and protein levels of representative species from the five antarcticfamilies of notothenoid fish.
+ Characterize the evolution of AFGP gene families and the suborder Notothenoidei using molecular and cytogenetics techniques.
