This proposal seeks continued funding for the Tetrahymena Stock Center to enable maintenance of its current operations, expand its capabilities, and ensure its sustainability as the primary resource for the preservation and distribution of genetically defined strains of Tetrahymena. Investigations aimed at understanding Tetrahymena biology have contributed many novel and important findings on cellular mechanisms that have direct relevance to human health and disease including cancer, infertility, and aging. Tetrahymena has also shown great promise as a platform for the production of recombinant proteins, including vaccine antigens and difficult-to-express human ion channels. Furthermore, it serves as an engaging teaching tool in K-12 and undergraduate classrooms. Specifically, our overall aims for the resource are to 1) continue to act as a strain repository accepting new strains and making cultures of Tetrahymena available to scientists and science educators at reasonable cost; 2) expand the resource by integrating additional large collections; 3) increase the visibility of Stock Center resources and increase publication of research findings by partnering with microPublications Biology; 4) curate new genomic information into the Tetrahymena Genome Database; 5) improve curation of stocks by assigning RRID designations to new acquisitions and use bioinformatics to link genes associated with specific stocks to human disease-associated genes; 6) increase the interoperability of genomic data by updating the current gene annotations and expanding the use of Gene Ontology designations; 7) facilitate new analyses by displaying gene expression data sets; 8) improve the Stock Center website and increase its capacity to gather assessment data; 9) use genomic data to identify the genetic lesions of strains in the repository with striking phenotypes thereby spurring additional research; 10) optimize gene knockout strategies to allow for timely completion of Tetrahymena strain engineering services offered by the Stock Center. Together, these activities aim to keep Tetrahymena at the forefront of biomedical research and achieve the Overall outcome of increasing research capacity of investigators using ciliates to make significant discoveries.

This project will support the use of Tetrahymena thermophila as a tool for basic and applied biomedical research. Research conducted with this organism has contributed fundamental knowledge of key biological processes and revealed understanding of health-related phenomena including cancer, aging, (in)fertility, respiratory and neuroendocrine function. It has also proven useful for practical applications as manufacturing system for vaccine candidates and therapeutics proteins for the treatment of human disease.