Data from: Gene expression under chronic heat stress in populations of the mustard hill coral (Porites astreoides) from different thermal environments

Recent evidence suggests that corals can acclimatize or adapt to local
stress factors through differential regulation of their gene expression.
Profiling gene expression in corals from diverse environments can
elucidate the physiological processes that may be responsible for
maximizing coral fitness in their natural habitat and lead to a better
understanding of the coral's capacity to survive the effects of
global climate change. In an accompanying paper, we show that Porites
astreoides from thermally different reef habitats exhibit distinct
physiological responses when exposed to 6 weeks of chronic temperature
stress in a common garden experiment. Here, we describe expression
profiles obtained from the same corals for a panel of 9 previously
reported and 10 novel candidate stress response genes identified in a
pilot RNA-Seq experiment. The strongest expression change was observed in
a novel candidate gene potentially involved in calcification, SLC26, a
member of the solute carrier family 26 anion exchangers, which was
down-regulated by 92-fold in bleached corals relative to controls. The
most notable signature of divergence between coral populations was
constitutive up-regulation of metabolic genes in corals from the warmer
inshore location, including the gluconeogenesis enzymes pyruvate
carboxylase and phosphoenolpyruvate carboxykinase and the lipid
beta-oxidation enzyme acyl-CoA dehydrogenase. Our observations highlight
several molecular pathways that were not previously implicated in the
coral stress response and suggest that host management of energy budgets
might play an adaptive role in holobiont thermotolerance.