Novel applications of thermocyclers for phenotyping invertebrate thermal responses

Abstract

High-throughput genomic methods are increasingly used to investigate invertebrate thermal responses with greater dimensionality and resolution than previously achieved. However, corresponding methods for characterizing invertebrate phenotypes are still lacking. To scale up the characterization of invertebrate thermal responses, we propose a novel use of thermocyclers as temperature-controlled incubators. Here, we tested the performance of thermocyclers as incubators and demonstrated the application of this method to efficiently characterize the thermal responses of model and non-model invertebrates. We found the thermocyclers performed with high precision, accuracy and resolution under vario..