My cup overflowith

One challenge I've faced in my project studying aculiferan biomineralization has been getting samples of aplacophorans suitable for RNA-based work. Often times, aplacs can be rare and I really need multiple specimens to have biological replicates for some of the experiments I plan to do. I had hoped to collect Epimenia here in Australia but so far that hasn't panned out. Fortunately, my wonderful collaborator and friend Dr. Christiane Todt was just on a cruise and collected tons of specimens of Stylomenia sulcodoryata and Chaetoderma nitidulum as well as one specimen each of Neomenia carinata and Scutopus ventrolineatus. Now I'm armed with plenty of material for traditional transcriptomes of mantle tissue a well as laser capture microdsisection and CEL-seq and in situ hybridization to look at gene expression in the cells secreting sclerites in these beasts as well as proteomic work looking at the protein component of the sclerites.

Stylomenia sulcodoryata
(source: http://www.artsdatabanken.no/Article/Article/398)

Chaetoderma
(source: http://www.whoi.edu/science/B/aplacophora/defchaetneo.html)