Meeting Abstract
Reef-building coral larvae expend their limited energy reserves producing costly GFP-like fluorescent proteins (FPs). The function of larval fluorescence is unclear but strongly correlates with dispersal related traits such as settlement and thermal tolerance. However, the causal link between FP expression and dispersal traits is not substantiated. We aimed to develop a method to knockdown red fluorescent protein production in larvae of Acropora millepora in order to identify the role of this gene on dispersal related traits in larvae, and more broadly, to develop a gene manipulation tool for reef-building corals to validate the roles of various candidate genes. This was approached with both a custom designed spice junction targeting vivo-morpholino and RNAi using 4 different transfection reagents complexed with double-stranded RNA for red FP. We found the most dramatic and significant reduction in larval redness using lipofectamine3000 and dsRNA, a result validated with qPCR. This is the first successful attempt at knocking down expression of a gene in a reef-building coral, which provides a key first step for investigating molecular mechanisms in coral larval physiology and development.
