High natural gene expression variation in the reef-building coral Acropora millepora: potential for acclimative and adaptive plasticity

BMC Genomics

Research Article

Ove Hoegh-Guldberg¹  Anthony J Bellantuono²  Mauricio Rodriguez-Lanetty²  Camila Granados-Cifuentes³  Tyrone Ridgway⁴ 

[1]ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and Coral Genomics Group, School of Pharmacy and Molecular Sciences, James Cook University, Townsville, QLD, Australia

[2]Global Change Institute, The University of Queensland, St Lucia, QLD, Australia

[3]Department of Biological Sciences, Florida International University, 33199, Miami, FL, USA

[4]Department of Biology, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, 70504, Lafayette, LA, USA

[5]Department of Biological Sciences, Florida International University, 33199, Miami, FL, USA

[6]Oceanica Consulting Pty Ltd, PO Box 462, 6913, Wembley, WA, Australia

[7]The Oceans Institute, University of Western Australia, 6009, Crawley, WA, Australia

关键词: Coral reefs;    Acropora millepora;    Gene expression variation;    Microarrays;    Microsatellites;    Intron;    Epigenetics;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2164-14-228

 received in 2012-05-14, accepted in 2013-02-27,  发布年份 2013

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundEcosystems worldwide are suffering the consequences of anthropogenic impact. The diverse ecosystem of coral reefs, for example, are globally threatened by increases in sea surface temperatures due to global warming. Studies to date have focused on determining genetic diversity, the sequence variability of genes in a species, as a proxy to estimate and predict the potential adaptive response of coral populations to environmental changes linked to climate changes. However, the examination of natural gene expression variation has received less attention. This variation has been implicated as an important factor in evolutionary processes, upon which natural selection can act.ResultsWe acclimatized coral nubbins from six colonies of the reef-building coral Acropora millepora to a common garden in Heron Island (Great Barrier Reef, GBR) for a period of four weeks to remove any site-specific environmental effects on the physiology of the coral nubbins. By using a cDNA microarray platform, we detected a high level of gene expression variation, with 17% (488) of the unigenes differentially expressed across coral nubbins of the six colonies (jsFDR-corrected, p < 0.01). Among the main categories of biological processes found differentially expressed were transport, translation, response to stimulus, oxidation-reduction processes, and apoptosis. We found that the transcriptional profiles did not correspond to the genotype of the colony characterized using either an intron of the carbonic anhydrase gene or microsatellite loci markers.ConclusionOur results provide evidence of the high inter-colony variation in A. millepora at the transcriptomic level grown under a common garden and without a correspondence with genotypic identity. This finding brings to our attention the importance of taking into account natural variation between reef corals when assessing experimental gene expression differences. The high transcriptional variation detected in this study is interpreted and discussed within the context of adaptive potential and phenotypic plasticity of reef corals. Whether this variation will allow coral reefs to survive to current challenges remains unknown.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Granados-Cifuentes et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2013. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.