Ecoinformatics of systemic homeostasis wild fish, environmental water and bottom mud
February 22, 2018
Social scientific approach visualizes the relationships between complex environmental factors
Environmental homeostasis can be perturbed by various physical, chemical and biological factors. Wild fish survives in extreme environments by sensing slight environmental changes. For example, the rising water temperature can alter the phenotypic sex of many teleost fishes to male; the day length determines the timing of fish spawning, and so on.. Advances in integrated analysis of multiple environmental factors enable the visualization of explicit and implicit relations within complicated global biological and ecological systems.
A RIKEN CSRS research team gathered big data on the metabolome, ionome, microbiome and phenotypes of more than 1000 individuals of wild yellowfin goby and their habitat (water and bottom sediment). The team developed an ecoinformatics approach to extract the significant factors affecting population characteristics as well as the influence of environmental factors such as temperature, salinity and inorganic elements on the growth and spawning of yellowfin goby. Based on the combined analyses using market basket analysis (MBA) method, which is used in the social sciences to analyze complex systems in politics and economy, multivariate clustering analysis and correlation network analysis, the team succeeded in visualization of metabolic and microbiomic characteristics, such as acetate metabolism, in relation to environmental temperature and spawning.
Further studies focused on monitoring and regulating the changes of the significant environmental factors identified in this ecoinformatics analysis might shed light on the prediction and prevention of the homeostatic imbalance of ecosystem.
- Original article
- Scientific Reports doi:10.1038/s41598-018-20120-x
- F. Wei, K. Sakata, T. Asakura, Y. Date, J. Kikuchi,
- "Systemic Homeostasis in Metabolome, Ionome and Microbiome of Wild Yellowfin Goby in Estuarine Ecosystem".
- Contact
- Jun Kikuchi; Team Leader
- Feifei Wei; Postdoctoral Researcher
- Environmental Metabolic Aanalysis Research Team
