Loggerhead sea turtle embryos (Caretta caretta) regulate expression of stress-response and developmental genes when exposed to a biologically realistic heat stress

Oviparous reptile embryos are expected to breach their critical thermal maxima if temperatures reach those predicted under current climate change models due to the lack the maternal buffering processes and parental care. Heat shock proteins (HSPs) are integral in the molecular response to thermal stress, and their expression is heritable, but the roles of other candidate families such as the heat shock factors (HSFs) have not been determined in reptiles. Here we subject embryonic sea turtles (Caretta caretta) to a biologically realistic thermal stress and employ de novo transcriptomic profiling of brain tissue to investigate the underlying molecular response. From a reference transcriptome of 302,293 transcripts, 179 were identified as differentially expressed between treatments. As anticipated, genes enriched in the heat shock treatment were primarily associated with the Hsp families, or were genes whose products play similar protein editing and chaperone functions (e.g. bag3, MYOC and...

若当前气候变化模型预测的气温情景成真，且缺乏母体缓冲过程与亲代抚育行为，卵生爬行动物胚胎将突破其临界热极限。热休克蛋白（HSPs）在热胁迫的分子应答中发挥核心作用，且其表达具有可遗传性，但包括热休克因子（HSFs）在内的其他候选基因家族在爬行动物中的功能尚未明确。本研究对蠵龟（Caretta caretta）胚胎施加具有生物学现实意义的热胁迫，并对其脑组织开展从头转录组分析（de novo transcriptomic profiling），以探究其潜在的分子应答机制。在包含302293条转录本的参考转录组中，共鉴定出179条在不同处理组间存在差异表达的基因。正如预期，热胁迫处理组富集的基因主要属于HSP家族，或是编码具有类似蛋白质编辑与分子伴侣功能的基因，例如bag3、MYOC等