A transcriptome resource for the coral, Orbicella faveolata (Scleractinia-Meruliniidae) – an emerging model of coral innate immunity
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Conservation Biology, Genetics, Genomics, Marine Biology, Molecular Biology
- Keywords
- RNA-seq, disease, transcriptome, Wnt, non-model organism, Dicer, Cnidaria, coral, innate immunity, Orbicella faveolata
- Copyright
- © 2015 Anderson et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2015. A transcriptome resource for the coral, Orbicella faveolata (Scleractinia-Meruliniidae) – an emerging model of coral innate immunity. PeerJ PrePrints 3:e1230v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.1230v1
Abstract
Research on climate change-driven coral disease outbreaks has greatly advanced our understanding of the coral innate immune system, and coral genomics has provided insight into the evolution of metazoan immune systems. However, only recently has next generation sequencing (NGS) technology been used to investigate coral immune responses to environmental stress and disease. In the present investigation, tissue of the threatened Caribbean reef-building coral, Orbicella faveolata¸ was collected during a warm water thermal anomaly and coral disease outbreak in 2010 in Puerto Rico. Multiplex sequencing of messenger RNA that was extracted from tissue samples of diseased, bleached and apparently healthy coral colonies was conducted on the Illumina GAIIx platform, and total reads were pooled accordingly for de novo assembly into contigs by Trinity software. From 70,745,177 raw short-sequence reads, 32,463 contigs were assembled in silico and taxonomically identified as O. faveolata in origin. The resulting reference transcriptome was annotated with gene ontologies, and sequences were mapped to KEGG pathways. The reference transcriptome presented here expands upon the genetic data currently available for O. faveolata. By sampling coral colonies affected by infectious disease and thermal stress in situ, it was possible to enrich the data set for genes that are expressed under natural conditions as part of the coral innate immune response. The results of the present investigation advance our understanding of the coral immune system and expand upon bioinformatic data available for O. faveolata – a threatened coral species that is widely studied as a model for immune responses to climate-driven stress and disease.
Author Comment
This is a submission for peer review in PeerJ.