Time course of gene expression response to decreasing environmental oxygen in a tidepool copepod

Tigriopus californicus is highly tolerant to environmental hypoxia stress. This project aimed to characterize molecular mechanisms associated with this tolerance by capturing the transcriptional transitions across cellular functions during the course of decreasing levels of dissolved oxygen. This design allows it to distinguish genetic pathways that, for example, are sensitive to any change in oxygen (i.e., expression changes linearly) from those that are recruited only during extreme levels of stress. We performed hypoxia stress experiments with groups of copepods from San Diego, California, and sampled mRNA at five different time points (described in more details in project Metada).