Establishment of a New Model Sea Anemone for Comparative Studies on Cnidarian-Algal Symbiosis

Mihirogi, Yukie; Kaneda, Michika; Yamagishi, Daisuke; Ishii, Yuu; Maruyama, Shinichiro; Nakamura, Shinya; Shimoyama, Natsuno; Oohori, Chihiro; Hatta, Masayuki

doi:10.2108/zs220099

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 34 publications

(35 reference statements)

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“…To quantify the symbiont composition within each sample, we aligned RNASeq reads to Symbiodinium goreaui (GenBank accession number: AF333515) and Durusdinium trenchii (GenBank accession number: LC718590) ITS2 sequences using the STAR aligner software (v. 2.7.0e) (Dobin et al., 2013 ; LaJeunesse, 2001 ; Mihirogi et al., 2023 ). We used the STAR option ‐‐outFilterMultimapNmax 1 to ensure that STAR reports only the best alignment for each read.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Patterns of methylation and transcriptional plasticity during thermal acclimation in a reef‐building coral

Guerrero,

Bay

2024

Evolutionary Applications

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Phenotypic plasticity can buffer organisms against short‐term environmental fluctuations. For example, previous exposure to increased temperatures can increase thermal tolerance in many species. Prior studies have found that acclimation to higher temperature can influence the magnitude of transcriptional response to subsequent acute thermal stress (hereafter, “transcriptional response modulation”). However, mechanisms mediating this gene expression response and, ultimately, phenotypic plasticity remain largely unknown. Epigenetic modifications are good candidates for modulating transcriptional response, as they broadly correlate with gene expression. Here, we investigate changes in DNA methylation as a possible mechanism controlling shifts in gene expression plasticity and thermal acclimation in the reef‐building coral Acropora nana. We find that gene expression response to acute stress is altered in corals acclimated to different temperatures, with many genes exhibiting a dampened response to heat stress in corals pre‐conditioned to higher temperatures. At the same time, we observe shifts in methylation during both acclimation (11 days) and acute heat stress (24 h). We observed that the acute heat stress results in shifts in gene‐level methylation and elicits an acute transcriptional response in distinct gene sets. Further, acclimation‐induced shifts in gene expression plasticity and differential methylation also largely occur in separate sets of genes. Counter to our initial hypothesis no overall correlation between the magnitude of differential methylation and the change in gene expression plasticity. We do find a small but statistically significant overlap in genes exhibiting both dampened expression response and shifts in methylation (14 genes), which could be candidates for further inquiry. Overall, our results suggest transcriptional response modulation occurs independently from methylation changes induced by thermal acclimation.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Patterns of methylation and transcriptional plasticity during thermal acclimation in a reef‐building coral

Guerrero,

Bay

2024

Evolutionary Applications

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Experimental bleaching of photosymbiotic amoeba revealed strain-dependent differences in algal symbiosis ability

Yamagishi,

Onuma,

Matsunaga

et al. 2024

Preprint

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Photosymbioses, the symbiotic relationships between photosynthetic algal symbionts and non- photosynthetic eukaryotic hosts, are sporadically found in a lot of eukaryotic lineages, but only a few taxa, such as cnidarians and ciliates hosting algal endosymbionts, have been actively studied for a long time. That has hindered understanding the universal mechanisms of the photosymbiosis establishment. Especially in Amoebozoa, only two species,Mayorella viridisandParachaos zoochlorella, are reported as photosymbiotic in nature, and their mechanisms of establishing symbiotic relationships are still unclear. To investigate the extent to which and how photosymbiotic amoebae depend on the symbiotic relationships,M. viridiswere treated with reagents that are known to induce the collapsing of photosymbiotic relationships, or bleaching, in other photosymbiotic species. As a result, we succeeded in artificially removing algal symbionts from hostM. viridiscells with an herbicide, 2- amino-3-chloro-1,4-naphthoquinone. The apo-symbiotic state amoeba cells were able to survive and grow to the same extent as the symbiotic state cells when they fed microbial prey, indicating that the algal symbionts are not essential for the host growth under certain conditions. Furthermore, to see whether the photosymbiotic state is reversible, we fed two strains of algal symbionts to the apo- symbiotic amoeba host. The result showed that the apo-symbiotic hosts were able to ingest symbiont cells and re-establish the symbiotic state. The efficiencies of ingesting algal cells were significantly different depending on algal symbiont strains, indicating that different algal strains possess discrete symbiotic abilities toM. viridis. To our knowledge, we provide first insights on the establishment and collapse of photosymbiosis in Amoebozoa, which pave the way to understand the universal mechanism of photosymbiosis utilizingM. viridisas a model system.

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Establishment of a New Model Sea Anemone for Comparative Studies on Cnidarian-Algal Symbiosis

Cited by 2 publications

References 34 publications

Patterns of methylation and transcriptional plasticity during thermal acclimation in a reef‐building coral

Patterns of methylation and transcriptional plasticity during thermal acclimation in a reef‐building coral

Experimental bleaching of photosymbiotic amoeba revealed strain-dependent differences in algal symbiosis ability

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