Identification of genes involved in heavy metal tolerance and transcriptomic changes caused by copper excess in the extremophilic green alga Chlamydomonas acidophila. Chlamydomonas acidophila strain:RT46

The transcriptome of the extremophilic microalga Chlamydomonas acidophila was sequenced using 454 GS-FLX Titanium platform. Putative annotations of the de novo assembled transcripts are based on BLAST searches against GenBank’s non-redundant protein database as well as Uniprot’s Swiss-Prot and TrEMBL databases. Sequencing was performed on a culture exposed to high concentration of copper (500 µM) and a control with no added copper. Analyses of differentially expressed transcripts and functional annotation were used to detect genes involved in metabolic pathways related to abiotic stress tolerance, focusing on effects caused by increased levels of copper.