Stress response assessment of coral under environmental changes using microarray

Abstract

The Kuroshio is a warm current running from tropical Philippines through subtropical Taiwan to the temperate region of Japan and Korea and it warmed most rapidly in 1981–1998, when sea surface temperatures rose by 1.5°C (0.9°C/decade), almost 7 times the global rate. Coral of Taiwan and Japan were closely linked by the Kuroshio Current and inevitably, the coral population and its distribution in Korea could be affected by warming currents. In this study, we chose Eleutherobia rubra which is a azooxanthellate soft coral around Korean peninsula to investigate its gene expression change against the environmental stress and constructed microarray. The probes in microarray was based on the noble and known genes sequences from NGS technology. Approximately 75,000 genes from E. rubra were used and we carried out heat stress experiment using microarray. This study focused on the identification of functional genes in coral to assess the molecular level responses to environmental stress like as seawater temperature change. To assess the coral health condition as well as coral stress responses, we purposed to identify molecular level stress responses using gene expression change as well as functional genes responding to external stress like increased seawater temperature.