Maternal effects in gene expression of interspecific coral hybrids

Parental coral colonies of A. tenuis and A. loripes were collected from Trunk Reef on the central Great Barrier Reef in November 2015. During spawning, four offspring groups (i.e., reciprocal F1 hybrids and two parental purebreds: TT (purebred A. tenuis), TL (hybrid), LT (hybrid) and LL (purebred A. loripes), were recruited and settled onto ceramic plugs. Detailed crossing protocol and experimental design is described in Chan et al. (2018).Coral recruits were reared under treatment conditions in filtered seawater for seven months at the National Sea Simulator of the Australian Institute of Marine Science. Treatment conditions included exposure to ambient or elevated temperature and pCO2 conditions: ambient conditions (27ºC and 415 ppm pCO2) elevated conditions (ambient +1 °C and 685 ppm pCO2)RNA-sequencing was conducted and the analysis showed that gene expression of the hybrid Acropora also showed clear maternal effects. Further details are presented in the paper Chan, WY, Chung, J, Peplow, LM, Hoffmann, AA, van Oppen, MJH. Maternal effects in gene expression of interspecific coral hybrids. Mol Ecol. 2021; 30: 517– 527. https://doi.org/10.1111/mec.15727