Data from: Phenotypic responses to temperature in the ciliate Tetrahymena thermophila ...

Understanding the effects of temperature on ecological and evolutionary processes is crucial for generating future climate adaptation scenarios. Using experimental evolution, we evolved the model ciliate Tetrahymena thermophila in an initially novel high temperature environment for more than 35 gene...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Weber De Melo, Vanessa, Lowe, Robert, Hurd, Paul J., Petchey, Owen L.
Format: Dataset
Language:English
Published: Dryad 2020
Subjects:
Online Access:https://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.v15dv41tb
https://datadryad.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.5061/dryad.v15dv41tb
Description
Summary:Understanding the effects of temperature on ecological and evolutionary processes is crucial for generating future climate adaptation scenarios. Using experimental evolution, we evolved the model ciliate Tetrahymena thermophila in an initially novel high temperature environment for more than 35 generations, closely monitoring population dynamics and morphological changes. We observed initially long lag phases in the high temperature environment that over about 26 generations reduced to no lag phase, a strong reduction in cell size and modifications in cell shape at high temperature. When exposing the adapted populations to their original temperature, most phenotypic traits returned to the observed levels in the ancestral populations, indicating phenotypic plasticity is an important component of this species thermal stress response. However, persistent changes in cell size were detected, indicating possible costs related to the adaptation process. Exploring the molecular basis of thermal adaptation will help ... : Experimental populations of T. thermophila were monitored with videos to estimate population abundances and obtain morphological measurements. The samples were placed in counting chambers and the videos were taken on a stereomicroscope (Leica M205 C) mounted with a digital CMOS camera (Hamamatsu Orca C11440, Hamamatsu Photonics, Japan) with 1.57X magnification. Each video comprised 125 frames in 5 seconds. The videos were processed using the R package BEMOVI version 1.0 (Pennekamp, Schtickzelle, and Petchey 2015), which extracts morphological information of all the moving cells in the field of view and allows for population density estimation. ...