Developing the ichthyosporean Creolimax fragrantissima as an experimentally tractable organism to address evolutionary and cell biological questions

SEBASTIÁN R. NAJLE; ALEKSANDRA KOZYCZKOWSKA; IÑAKI RUIZ-TRILLO; CLAUDIO SCAZZOCHIO

Praga

Congreso; 15th International Congress of Protistology ICOP2017; 2017

International Society of Protistologists

The origin of multicellular animals from their unicellular ancestor was a pivotal step in the evolution of life. Recent studies on unicellular relatives of animals have revealed that their genome contains genes crucial for metazoan development and multicellularity, including those involved in cell?cell communication, cell proliferation and cell differentiation. What remains unclear is the role of those genes in the unicellular relatives of animals, and how they were co-opted at the onset of Metazoa. To address those questions, we need to perform functional studies on those taxa. We will here present our work towards development of Creolimax fragrantissima, as an experimentally tractable system, to investigate both the origin of animal multicellularity, as well as its developmental mode through a syncitial stage. C. fragrantissima is an ideal organism to be experimentally tractable because of 1) its specific life cycle, which differs from the developmental mode of other close unicellular relatives of animals (such as choanoflagellates and filastereans), 2) its well-annotated genome, 3) preliminary working transgenesis tool, and 4) it is easy to culture.We have further optimized the transfection protocol in order to perform functional studies and set up some basis for genome-editing technologies. Moreover, we are currently establishing selection strategies to achieve stable transfection. Progress and the potential implications of our research will be presented and further discussed.