Meeting Abstract
Climate change has become the biggest issue humans have had to face yet. Above all the other impacts that climate change has had on the natural world, most notably its decimation of coral reef ecosystems. With heat waves at new intensities, corals are bleaching at alarming rates causing whole ecosystems to collapse and a loss of most reefs around the world. In order to combat this, scientists have been studying the effects of climate change, and how to possibly combat it, using sea anemone models that have similar relationships with zooxanthellae. The sea anemone species Exaiptasia pallida has emerged as a laboratory model for studying corals associations with the zooxanthellae endosymbionts and its associated stress response with the host organism in elevated water temperatures. The focus of the study was to highlight comparisons of differential gene expression between E.pallida and Diadumene lineata, another species of sea anemone that does not have zooxanthellae. Both species of sea anemone were tested in the same heat conditions of 25 °C (control), 30 °C (elevated sea surface temperatures) and 35 °C (heat wave). The inclusion of D. lineata was to identify if the differentially expressed stress genes of E.pallida, that may be restricted to stress response in sea anemones, and not mimic those observed in corals. Individuals representing both species had total RNA extracted and sequenced using a TAGseq approach to identify any differentially expressed genes related to stress response as it relates to elevated water temperatures. Our analysis also evaluated how the overall genomic heat response in these sea anemones compared to to different species of corals as it related to future resilience to climate change.
