Skeletal muscle proteome differences between elephant seal pups with varying levels of water exposure during postnatal development

• Main Authors: Poeun, Maliysia, Bravo-Rios, Alicia, Khudyakov, Jane
• Format: Text
• Language: unknown
• Published: Scholarly Commons 2024
• Subjects: Elephant Seal; Elephant Seals
• Online Access: https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/rcs/2024/undergraduate/3

Elephant seals are amphibious mammals that feed in the open ocean but are born on land. Pups begin to enter water and swim once they are weaned and do not leave for their first foraging trip until 2-3 months after weaning. Depending on the location of where they are born, weaned pups may have different levels of water exposure during development. While water entry and swimming are innate behaviors in seals and are crucial to their development and survival, the environment (e.g., access to water) may also play a role. To determine whether the environment plays a role in development of dive capacity, we compared the proteomes of muscle collected from weaned elephant seal pups at two separate beaches at Point Reyes National Seashore (California), South Beach and Drake’s Beach. There is far more wave activity and distance between the rookery and water in South Beach than Drake's Beach, so pups born in South Beach often do not start swimming as early as pups in Drake's Beach. Therefore, we hypothesized that pups on Drake's Beach would have higher levels of antioxidant and oxygen-storing-related proteins since they were exposed to swimming earlier. We identified over 900 protein groups, of which over 400 groups differed in abundance between groups. Ninety-nine protein groups were more abundant in the Drake's Beach population, while 303 were more abundant in South Beach seals. Drake's Beach pups had higher abundance of proteins related to Muscle Contraction, Fatty Acid Oxidation, Amino Acid Metabolism, Glycolysis and Gluconeogenesis, and TCA Cycle. South Beach pups had higher abundance of proteins related to Cytoplasmic Ribosomal Proteins, Proteasome Degradation, Electron Transport Chain, Oxidative Phosphorylation, and Folate Metabolism. Our study helps us gain more of an understanding of how the muscle proteome in amphibious mammals respond to different environments during development.