Assessing Thermal Stress Responses of Alveopora Japonica Using Microarray

Abstract

The reef building corals in the region have rapidly expanded their range northward in response to warming temperatures. Furthermore, coral reefs 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, similar to the situation in Japan and Taiwan. In this study, we chose Alveopora japonicawhich is a hard coral rapidly expanding the population around Jeju Island 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 60,000 genes from Alveopora japonica 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. Climate change and rising seawater temperature are placing spatially divergent stresses on the world's coral ecosystem through increasing ocean surface temperatures and ocean acidification. 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. Approximately 200 genes including Kinesin-like protein, guanine-nucleotide releasing factor, caspase, apoptotic cysteine protease, etc changed their gene expressions after heat shock stress. These isolated genes were clustered into functional groups like information storage and processing, cellular processes and signaling and metabolism. Over 70 % of isolated genes were related to the signal transduction.