Fröhlich Lab - Proteomics
Ecotoxicoproteomics / Microplastics
In light of increasing environmental pollution, the field of ecotoxicoproteomics is becoming progressively important as proteins are essential to an organism's physiology and respond rapidly to changing environmental conditions. In collaboration with Prof. Christian Laforsch (Department of Biology, University of Bayreuth), we are investigating the molecular mechanisms underlying the (often negative) effects of particulate contaminants, in particular microplastics, on various model organisms, such as the water flea Daphnia or the bivalve Dreissena (Trotter et al. 2021, Brehm et al. 2022). Together with scientists from diverse disciplines, we have joined forces in the SFB 1357-Mikroplastik to gain a more fundamental understanding of microplastic effects on biological, but also on physical and chemical processes. Especially interesting for us is Daphnia, whose genome was published in 2011, and contains the so far highest number of genes, among them many with no functional homologues in other species. These genes are supposed to be responsible for the excellent ability of Daphnia to adapt to environmental stress conditions, which we analyzed in several phenotypic plasticity studies (Otte et al. 2015, Otte et al. 2014). Through the continuous improvement of methods in LC-MS/MS, we constantly improve the analytic depth of our proteomics experiments and create references for further ecotoxicoproteomic studies. (Wilde et al. 2022).
