Dr. Jeyasingh's recent paper in Molecular Ecology entitled "How do consumers deal with stoichiometric constraints? Lessons from functional genomics using Daphnia pulex" has recently been highlighted by the Faculty of 1000 as one of the top published articles in biology and medicine:

"This is the first study to deploy the new functional microarray for the keystone crustacean Daphnia pulex, whose genome sequence was recently completed and annotated. It represents a major step in ecological genomics, opening the ‘black box’ of consumer metabolic shifts that underlie food web dynamics under stoichiometric constraints. Ecological stoichiometry theory considers ecological interactions, such as predator-prey relations, as composite chemical reactions, reducing enormous metabolic complexity down to simple metrics of stoichiometric imbalance between consumer and food. While these approaches often successfully account for reduced growth and trophic transfer efficiency of animals consuming stoichiometrically imbalanced food, little is known about the metabolic mechanisms underlying these changes. This transcriptomic study, the first of its kind, begins to shed some light on the myriad ways that animal metabolism shifts when faced with a diet with excess carbon/energy and insufficient phosphorus (P), by comparing animals raised on nutritious, P-sufficient algae with those raised on poor quality, P-limited algae. The study considered changes in expression across >8220 genes and found ~1800 whose expression was altered by the diet manipulation. A number of these changes dealt with pathways to sequester limiting nutrients; more surprisingly, a significant number appeared to be related to dealing with secondary metabolic products of the P-limited algae. Given that Daphnia is a ‘keystone’ species in lake ecosystems, this study represents a significant milestone in the ongoing application of the tools and perspectives of the genomics revolution to a better understanding of ecosystem dynamics."