연산호, 분홍바다맨드라미의 스트레스 반응유전자

Abstract

The soft coral community has critical importance for marine biodiversity in Jeju, Korea. However the coral communities are in serious decline mainly due to the drastic environmental changes, which caused by human activities. The global warming also affects to the distribution of soft coral species. These kinds of physical and chemical stresses could be act as main restriction factors for the coral species distribution. Thus understanding the gene expression dynamics, which affected by such environmental stresses, could reflect the present condition of a coral community and let us forecast the fate of a community against to the drastic environmental changes. The potential thermal and chemical stress responsive genes from a soft coral Scleronephthya gracillimum were identified by construction of standard and stress-exposed-paired subtractive cDNA library and differential display PCR. For subtractive cDNA library, the soft coral colonies were exposed to higher temperature (28°C) or exposed to benzo[a]pyrene (BaP, 1 µM) for 24 h under the controlled condition. After the library construction, about 500 clones were randomly selected and sequenced from heat-shocked group. The clones showed high homologies to 34 known genes. In BaP-exposed group, we obtained soft coral genes showed high homologies to 37 known genes from randomly selected 700 clones. The physiological changes of soft corals after stress exposure could be predicted with the gene list. The detailed gene expression analyses of each gene are on the way. The differential display PCR were carried out to heat-shocked and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs)-exposed groups. With 120 random primer combinations, 334 differentially expressed gene candidates were obtained. The acquisition of novel and authentic genes response to such environmental stresses is expected.