Differentially expressed genes of octocoal, Eleutherobia rubra against heat stress and the local environment

Abstract

Recently major impacts of climate change including, uprising seawater temperature and ocean acidification, might have accelerated the process of destruction on coral ecosystem worldwide. Soft coral ecosystem in South Sea of Korea is one of the coral communities affected by global warming strongly because the fast warming Kuroshio Current arrives Korean peninsula from the origin of the northern Philippines. In this research, we studied the physiological aspect and transcriptional responses of the coral, Eleutherobia rubra using the heat exposure experiment. We collected corals and extracted RNA after heat stress experiments. For the heat stress experiment, we exposed corals to temperature (26 0C) for 24h and hybridized those RNAs with that of control group (180C) on the Oligo chip. As the results, we identified several groups of genes which transcription changed compared with control group. Antioxidant genes, ubiquitin-related genes, calcium ion-responsive genes, genome-related genes, and telomerase-related genes were explored in heat exposed coral groups and we compared those gene expressions in spring and summer and also in different locality with various latitudes.