Characterising nutritional phenotypes using experimental nutrigenomics: Is there nutrient-specificity to different dietary stress?

Our ability to directly measure and monitor poor nutrition in individual animals and ecological communities is hampered by methodological limitations. These limitations prevent the accurate quantification of nutritional status in individuals with an unknown nutritional history. In this study, we use nutrigenomics to identify potential nutritional biomarkers in the freshwater zooplankton Daphnia pulex, a ubiquitous primary consumer and sentinel of environmental change. We grew animals in 6 ecological relevant nutritional treatments; low carbon (food), low phosphorus, low nitrogen, low calcium, high Cyanobacteria and nutrient replete. We extracted RNA for sequencing before using a bioinformatics pipeline to identify genes that were highly nutrient responsive and capable of predicting nutritional status with a high degree of accuracy. This is a key step in uncovering and explaining the causes and consequences of nutritional limitation in animal consumers and their responses to small- and large-scale changes in biogeochemical cycles