Fatty acid bioconversion in harpacticoid copepods in a changing environment: a transcriptomic approach

By 2100, global warming is predicted to significantly reduce the capacity of marine primary producers for long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acid (LC-PUFA) synthesis. Primary consumers such as harpacticoid copepods (Crustacea) might mitigate the resulting adverse effects on the food web by increased LC-PUFA bioconversion. Here, we present a high-quality de novo transcriptome assembly of the copepod Platychelipus littoralis , exposed to changes in both temperature (+3°C) and dietary LC-PUFA availability. Using this transcriptome, we detected multiple transcripts putatively encoding for LC-PUFA-bioconverting front-end fatty acid desaturases and elongases, and performed phylogenetic analyses to identify their relationship with sequences of other (crustacean) taxa. While temperature affected the absolute fatty acid concentrations in copepods, LC-PUFA levels remained unaltered even when copepods were fed a LC-PUFA-deficient diet. While this suggests plasticity of LC-PUFA bioconversion within P. littoralis , none of the putative front-end desaturase or elongase transcripts were differentially expressed under the applied treatments. Nevertheless, the transcriptome presented here provides a sound basis for future ecophysiological research on harpacticoid copepods.