Table 1.
Degenerative primers used for the isolation of crustacyanin subunit A and C.
Figure 1.
Example of cooked albino (a), light (b) and dark (c) F. merguiensis used in this study.
Albino (a), light (b) and dark (c) prawns in the top row are uncooked, with a photo of the same animal after cooking directly below for comparison.
Figure 2.
Hybridisation layout of the albino, light and dark groups across three 4×44K microarrays.
Table 2.
Primer pairs for qPCR analysis of dark, light and albino F. merguiensis individuals.
Figure 3.
Protein alignment of lipocalins.
Drosophila melanogaster neural lazarillo (GenBank: AAF51378) protein sequence aligned with a) deduced F. merguiensis crustacyanin subunit A protein sequence (GenBank: HM370278), partial P. monodon (GenBank: ACL37117) and M. japonicus (GenBank: ACL37116) crustacyanin subunit A protein sequences, and b) deduced F. merguiensis crustacyanin subunit C protein sequence (GenBank: HM370279), partial P. monodon (GenBank: ACL37123) and M. japonicus (GenBank: ACL37122) crustacyanin subunit C protein sequences. Blue highlighted segments correspond to motifs with the yellow inserts marking the conserved amino acids in these motifs. SCR stands for structurally conserved region, and grey highlights the six cysteine residues.
Table 3.
Microarray probes differentially expressed across albino, light and dark prawns.
Table 4.
Protein domains and functions of 21 unannotated gene sequences differentially expressed in the microarray analysis.
Figure 4.
Crustacyanin subunit A and C gene copy numbers according to their colour groups (mean ± SE).
Animals were separated into their respective colour groups (albino [n = 9], light [n = 12] and dark [n = 12]). Different superscripts (a, b) in the graphs represent significant differences (p<.05).
Figure 5.
Total astaxanthin levels (mean ± SE) extracted from albino (n = 9), light (n = 12) and dark (n = 12) prawns.
Pigment was extracted from the 5th abdominal segment of each of the 33 prawns. Different superscripts (a, b) in the graphs represent significant differences (p<0.05).
Figure 6.
Scatter plot of crustacyanin subunit A and total astaxanthin levels.
All colour groups were included into the scatter plot (0 = albino, 1 = light, 2 = dark), with crustacyanin subunit A and C showing the same pattern (subunit C not shown).