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Transcriptomic responses to darkness stress point to common coral bleaching mechanisms

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Abstract

Coral bleaching occurs in response to numerous abiotic stressors, the ecologically most relevant of which is hyperthermic stress due to increasing seawater temperatures. Bleaching events can span large geographic areas and are currently a salient threat to coral reefs worldwide. Much effort has been focused on understanding the molecular and cellular events underlying bleaching, and these studies have mainly utilized heat and light stress regimes. In an effort to determine whether different stressors share common bleaching mechanisms, we used complementary DNA (cDNA) microarrays for the corals Acropora palmata and Montastraea faveolata (containing >10,000 features) to measure differential gene expression during darkness stress. Our results reveal a striking transcriptomic response to darkness in A. palmata involving chaperone and antioxidant up-regulation, growth arrest, and metabolic modifications. As these responses were previously measured during thermal stress, our results suggest that different stressors may share common bleaching mechanisms. Furthermore, our results point to hypoxia and endoplasmic reticulum stress as critical cellular events involved in molecular bleaching mechanisms. On the other hand, we identified a meager transcriptomic response to darkness in M. faveolata where gene expression differences between host colonies and sampling locations were greater than differences between control and stressed fragments. This and previous coral microarray studies reveal the immense range of transcriptomic responses that are possible when studying two coral species that differ greatly in their ecophysiology, thus pointing to the importance of comparative approaches in forecasting how corals will respond to future environmental change.

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Acknowledgments

We thank the following people associated with STRI in Panamá: R. Collin, G. Jácome, P. Gondola, and other staff at the Bocas del Toro station and E. Gomez and J. Jara at the Naos Laboratory. We also thank M. A. Coffroth for initial input with tank experiments and the many members of the Medina Lab responsible for cDNA microarray construction. Lastly, we thank three anonymous reviewers whose comments greatly improved the manuscript. This study was supported through an STRI Pre-doctoral Fellowship and an NSF award to M.D. (OISE 0837455) and NSF awards to M.M. (BE-GEN 0313708 and IOS 0644438). This is contribution #4 of the STRI Caribbean Reef Futures initiative.

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  1. M. K. DeSalvo

    Present address: Department of Anesthesia, UCSF School of Medicine, Mission Bay Campus, 600 16th St., Box 2200, San Francisco, CA, 94158, USA

  2. S. Sunagawa

    Present address: European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Meyerhofstraße 1, 69117, Heidelberg, Germany

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  1. School of Natural Sciences, University of California Merced, 5200 North Lake Road, Merced, CA, 95343, USA

    M. K. DeSalvo, A. Estrada, S. Sunagawa & Mónica Medina

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  1. M. K. DeSalvo
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  2. A. Estrada
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Correspondence to Mónica Medina.

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Communicated by Environment Editor Prof. Rob van Woesik.

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DeSalvo, M.K., Estrada, A., Sunagawa, S. et al. Transcriptomic responses to darkness stress point to common coral bleaching mechanisms. Coral Reefs 31, 215–228 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00338-011-0833-4

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