Dataset Information

Compartment-specific transcriptomics in a reef-building coral exposed to elevated temperatures.

ABSTRACT: Although rising ocean temperatures threaten scleractinian corals and the reefs they construct, certain reef corals can acclimate to elevated temperatures to which they are rarely exposed in situ. Specimens of the model Indo-Pacific reef coral Pocillopora damicornis collected from upwelling reefs of Southern Taiwan were previously found to have survived a 36-week exposure to 30°C, a temperature they encounter infrequently and one that can elicit the breakdown of the coral-dinoflagellate (genus Symbiodinium) endosymbiosis in many corals of the Pacific Ocean. To gain insight into the subcellular pathways utilized by both the coral hosts and their mutualistic Symbiodinium populations to acclimate to this temperature, mRNAs from both control (27°C) and high (30°C)-temperature samples were sequenced on an Illumina platform and assembled into a 236 435-contig transcriptome. These P. damicornis specimens were found to be ~60% anthozoan and 40% microbe (Symbiodinium, other eukaryotic microbes, and bacteria), from an mRNA-perspective. Furthermore, a significantly higher proportion of genes from the Symbiodinium compartment were differentially expressed after two weeks of exposure. Specifically, at elevated temperatures, Symbiodinium populations residing within the coral gastrodermal tissues were more likely to up-regulate the expression of genes encoding proteins involved in metabolism than their coral hosts. Collectively, these transcriptome-scale data suggest that the two members of this endosymbiosis have distinct strategies for acclimating to elevated temperatures that are expected to characterize many of Earth's coral reefs in the coming decades.

SUBMITTER: Mayfield AB

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4265203 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Compartment-specific transcriptomics in a reef-building coral exposed to elevated temperatures.

Mayfield Anderson B AB Wang Yu-Bin YB Chen Chii-Shiarng CS Lin Chung-Yen CY Chen Shu-Hwa SH

Molecular ecology 20141201 23

Although rising ocean temperatures threaten scleractinian corals and the reefs they construct, certain reef corals can acclimate to elevated temperatures to which they are rarely exposed in situ. Specimens of the model Indo-Pacific reef coral Pocillopora damicornis collected from upwelling reefs of Southern Taiwan were previously found to have survived a 36-week exposure to 30°C, a temperature they encounter infrequently and one that can elicit the breakdown of the coral-dinoflagellate (genus Sy ...[more]

PMID: 25354956

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Project description:The potential to adapt to a changing climate depends in part upon the standing genetic variation present in wild populations. In corals, the dispersive larval phase is particularly vulnerable to the effects of environmental stress. Larval survival and response to stress during dispersal and settlement will play a key role in the persistence of coral populations. To test the hypothesis that larval transcription profiles reflect population specific responses to thermal stress, symbiont-free gametes of the scleractinian coral Montastraea faveolata were collected from Florida and Mexico and raised under normal and elevated temperatures. These populations have been shown to exchange larvae frequently enough to prevent significant differentiation of neutral loci. Differences among thousands of genes were simultaneously characterized using microarrays, allowing investigation of gene expression patterns among wild populations under stressful environmental conditions. Results show site-specific signatures of gene expression in larvae of a reef-building coral from different parts of its range (despite low genetic divergence), and reveal both local and general components of stress response during later stages of larval development. These results provide evidence of site-specific variation in the face of gene flow, which may represent functional genetic variation in different subpopulations, and support the idea that coral host genomes may indeed house the adaptive potential needed to deal with changing environmental conditions. The experimental setup followed a reference design, i.e. all samples were hybridized against the same pool made up of equal amounts of RNA from all samples collected in Mexico. For samples from Mexico we used three technical replicates for each treatment temperature, for samples from Florida three biological replicates were used for each treatment temperature, except for the high temperature samples at day two where only two replicates were available due to high larval mortality at that temperature. Common reference samples were labeled with Cy3, temperature treatment samples with Cy5. Microarrays for M. faveolata contained 1,314 coding sequences, of which 43% had functional annotations as determined by homology to known genes.

Dataset Information

Compartment-specific transcriptomics in a reef-building coral exposed to elevated temperatures.

Publications

Compartment-specific transcriptomics in a reef-building coral exposed to elevated temperatures.

Similar Datasets

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