Meeting Abstract
The randomness of coral disease dynamics suggests that differences in individual coral’s susceptibility may be a major factor influencing mortality rates in a population. Understanding the cellular mechanisms responsible for these differences could lead to the development of much-needed tools to forecast coral disease risks. Here, we compared global gene expression profiles of individual corals challenged with a bacterial pathogen to reveal molecular signatures correlated with disease outcome. We measured mortality rates for eight adult colonies of Acropora millepora from two Great Barrier Reef populations after bacteria challenge with putative coral pathogens, Vibrio spp. Significant difference in mortality between colonies was associated with differential gene expression in response to the bacterial challenge, but not with immune responses at the protein level. Genes associated with growth and defense against oxidative stress were upregulated in corals that survived bacterial challenge relative to those that did not. Conversely, surviving corals downregulated genes associated with signal transduction and metalloendopeptidase activity. These susceptibility-associated genes can become biomarkers to evaluate coral disease risk in nature, since their expression in an individual informs us of their likely disease outcome.
