Meeting Abstract
Anthropogenic activity is rapidly shifting environmental variables, causing an urgent need to understand how organisms will respond to changing conditions. This is especially important for oysters as they provide essential ecosystem services including water filtration, shoreline stabilization, and habitat for other marine invertebrates. Within the northern Gulf of Mexico, salinity is one of the most important variables impacting Crassostrea virginica and is expected to change rapidly over the coming century. Our objective is to improve our understanding of how the eastern oyster will respond to salinity changes by addressing a major gap concerning the potential for local adaptation to drive differential stress responses across populations. Specifically, we will focus on the role of gene expression changes because shifts in gene expression across populations are often crucial for adaptation to an environmental change. To approach this objective, adult oysters were collected from two sites in Louisiana which naturally differ in their salinity regimes. These oysters were placed in common garden conditions, spawned, and the resulting juveniles were outplanted to either a high or low salinity site. After 15 months of exposure, TagSeq was used to measure the gene expression of juveniles from both treatments. We expect that at both sites there will be differentially expressed genes between individuals with different parental origins representing localized responses to salinity stress. We expect this to be most noticeable at the low salinity site, as this represents the most stressful condition. Differentially expressed genes can provide insight into mechanisms underlying population differences in the physiological response to salinity stress.
