Meeting Abstract
Not all environmental stressors are equivalent in terms of how they shape the life history and fitness of an organism. Yet, we have limited understanding of where in the processing of different environmental stressors divergence occurs and how this translates to the organismal level. Additionally, the response to a stressor maybe be dependent upon the context in which it is received — i.e., the other stressors the animal may experience in their environment or their genetic background. Transcriptomics can be used to characterize the genomic responses in a context specific manner and translate these responses to how they effect the cellular, physiological and organismal levels. Here I discuss what we have learned from multiple “molecular stress response” studies that include analyses at the transcriptomic level. I specifically focus on how transcriptomic responses to different stressors can diverge (despite having a similar corticosterone responses), how genetic background can alter the response to a stressor, and how a primary stressor can alter the response to a secondary stressor. These studies use ecologically relevant environmental stressors with either Daphnia where we can directly measure fitness (i.e. lifetime reproductive output), or in reptiles where we can link tissue-specific transcriptomic responses to physiology and life history.
