Publication Date:
2015-06-27
Description:
As global warming continues, reef-building corals could avoid local population declines through "genetic rescue" involving exchange of heat-tolerant genotypes across latitudes, but only if latitudinal variation in thermal tolerance is heritable. Here, we show an up-to-10-fold increase in odds of survival of coral larvae under heat stress when their parents come from a warmer lower-latitude location. Elevated thermal tolerance was associated with heritable differences in expression of oxidative, extracellular, transport, and mitochondrial functions that indicated a lack of prior stress. Moreover, two genomic regions strongly responded to selection for thermal tolerance in interlatitudinal crosses. These results demonstrate that variation in coral thermal tolerance across latitudes has a strong genetic basis and could serve as raw material for natural selection.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Dixon, Groves B -- Davies, Sarah W -- Aglyamova, Galina A -- Meyer, Eli -- Bay, Line K -- Matz, Mikhail V -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2015 Jun 26;348(6242):1460-2. doi: 10.1126/science.1261224.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Department of Integrative Biology, University of Texas at Austin, 205 W. 24th Street C0990, Austin, TX 78712, USA. ; Department of Integrative Biology, Oregon State University, 3106 Cordley Hall, Corvallis, OR 97331, USA. ; Australian Institute of Marine Science, PMB 3, Townsville MC, Queensland 4810, Australia. l.bay@aims.gov.au matz@utexas.edu. ; Department of Integrative Biology, University of Texas at Austin, 205 W. 24th Street C0990, Austin, TX 78712, USA. l.bay@aims.gov.au matz@utexas.edu.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26113720" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
Acclimatization/*genetics
;
Animals
;
Anthozoa/*genetics/*physiology
;
*Coral Reefs
;
Extinction, Biological
;
Gene Expression
;
Gene Frequency
;
Genetic Markers
;
*Global Warming
;
*Hot Temperature
;
Larva/genetics/physiology
;
Selection, Genetic
;
Stress, Physiological/genetics
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
