[Coral-List] heat-light stress gene expression in Porites spp.

[Carly Kenkel]

Dear colleagues,

PLoS ONE has just published our paper on the development of qPCR-based
assays to detects stress in Porites corals. There are some lab-based
experiments as well as analysis of wild-collected samples from different
thermal regimes. We found that the genes most indicative of ongoing
heat-light stress in P.astreoides (as well as P.lobata) are the small heat
shock protein hsp16, undergoing rapid up-regulation by several hundred (!)
fold under stress, and actin, which becomes down-regulated by about 4-fold.
We introduce a self-normalizing qPCR assay based on just these two genes,
which, by combining their anti-correlated responses, attains a dynamic
range of over 1000-fold.

This paper is the first one in the series describing the results of our
"QPCR for coral biologists" workshop (
http://www.bio.utexas.edu/research/matz_lab/matzlab/QPCR.html ), which we
have taught for the past three years in the Florida Keys.

Here is the link to the paper:
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0026914

cheers

Carly Kenkel
Mikhail Matz