Picking climate change winners for assisted gene flow interventions on coral reefs

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One of the most important questions for biodiversity conservation in the face of global climate change is whether species will adapt, acclimatise, migrate or be extirpated. AGF involves the deliberate movement of individuals between populations within species ranges to increase the frequency of better adapted genotypes. AGF can be coupled with selective breeding of offspring from parents with certain adaptive phenotypic traits (e.g., elevated heat resistance). These approaches have been suggested as ground-breaking conservation tools in certain economically important ecosystems such as coral reefs. Both approaches require identification of "winners", i.e., naturally occurring genotypes preadapted to cope with anticipated future conditions. If successful, these techniques could buy time for coral reefs already at great risk from climate change disturbances. As part of a 5-year ERC funded project (Coralassist) we are identifying variation in heat resistance within populations of corals in Palau, Micronesia using thermal stress trials. We are examining whether selectively bred corals can be translocated to reefs in sufficiently large numbers and whether heat resistance is heritable. Using cutting edge proteomics we are identifying underlying causes of variation in heat resistance. Proteins that differ between heat stress treatments are examined using pathway analysis, (e.g., String, PathVisio) to identify biological processes, molecular functions associated with a given set of proteins and protein - protein interactions and associations. The aim of this project would be to develop tolerance indicators as it relates to protein abundance with the ultimate goal of developing markers to identify tolerant genotypes for AGF programmes without the need for heat stress trials.