139 - Leveraging Third Generation DNA Sequencing Technology to Explore Role of Epigenetics in Round Scad Fish under Global Climate Stress

Global climate change has been a recent pressing issue that has been seen to have environmental impacts on various ecosystems. Such environmental changes induce stress-related heritable traits without changes to the genome’s coding, a concept known as epigenetics. DNA methylation plays a key role in these cellular responses to environmental stress. The Round Scad fish is an affordable source of protein for common citizens in the Philippines, but is currently facing rapid decline both in population and average body size. The purpose of our study is to explore the patterns of DNA methylation in wild Round Scad to determine whether these changes are associated with epigenetic response to stress due to global climate change. Samples of fish DNA from the Philippines were collected and isolated. Using nanopore MinION, a portable third generation DNA sequencing technology, we are able to obtain initial DNA sequences. This technology has the advantage of directly identifying methylated nucleotides using built in softwares. Here, we shall report on the initial data comparing it with DNA methylation patterns in stress response genes of the model organism, Zebrafish. We anticipate that long term findings from this project will provide information critical to managing Round Scad and other marine fish facing similar environmental stressors.