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A coral transcriptome in the Anthropocene as an "alternative stable state"

摘要


In contrast to many coral reefs across the globe, those of Taiwan's deep south had, until the summer of 2020, not generally been greatly affected by climate change-driven seawater temperature rise. This has been attributed to the effects of cold-water upwelling, which naturally cools reefs within Nanwan Bay during the warmest times of the year; episodic upwelling has also thermally "hardened" the resident corals, and prior works sought to uncover the molecular basis of such thermotolerance in colonies of the model coral Pocillopora acuta collected from Nanwan Bay by exposing fragments to sustained high temperatures (30°C) in laboratory mesocosms for nine months. Although all corals ultimately acclimated to this hypothetically stress-inducing temperature ex situ, the dinoflagellate endosymbionts residing within the host corals' gastrodermal cells collectively displayed a concerted, sustained mRNA-level response to prolonged high-temperature exposure. Herein we used univariate, multivariate, and modeling approaches with the same transcriptomic dataset and identified numerous genes only expressed by corals at high temperatures; although this finding was not generally supported by real-time PCR, these genes may nevertheless be of use to those seeking to develop biomarker assays or molecularly biology-trained predictive models for identifying corals displaying "alternative stable states," in which their cellular biology has fundamentally changed on account of having acclimatized to chronically high temperatures.

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