The red coral (Corallium rubrum) transcriptome: a new resource for population genetics and local adaptation studies

The question of species survival and evolution in heterogeneous environments has long been a subject for study. Indeed, it is often difficult to identify the molecular basis of adaptation to contrasted environments, and nongenetic effects increase the difficulty to disentangle fixed effects, such as genetic adaptation, from variable effects, such as individual phenotypic plasticity, in adaptation. Nevertheless, this question is also of great importance for understanding the evolution of species in a context of climate change. The red coral (Corallium rubrum) lives in the Mediterranean Sea, where at depths ranging from 5 to 600 m, it meets very contrasted thermal conditions. The shallowest populations of this species suffered from mortality events linked with thermal anomalies that have highlighted thermotolerance differences between individuals. We provide here a new transcriptomic resource, as well as candidate markers for the study of local adaptation. We sequenced the transcriptome o...