Divergent evolutionary histories of DNA markers in a Hawaiian population of the coral Montipora capitata

Hollie M Putnam; Diane K Adams; Ehud Zelzion; Nicole E Wagner; Huan Qiu; Tali Mass; Paul G Falkowski; Ruth D Gates; Debashish Bhattacharya

doi:10.7717/peerj.3319

Divergent evolutionary histories of DNA markers in a Hawaiian population of the coral Montipora capitata

PeerJ. 2017 May 18:5:e3319. doi: 10.7717/peerj.3319. eCollection 2017.

Authors

Hollie M Putnam^#^{1

2}, Diane K Adams^#³, Ehud Zelzion⁴, Nicole E Wagner⁴, Huan Qiu⁴, Tali Mass⁵, Paul G Falkowski^{3

6}, Ruth D Gates¹, Debashish Bhattacharya⁴

Affiliations

¹ Hawai'i Institute of Marine Biology, Kaneohe, HI, United States of America.
² Department of Biological Sciences, University of Rhode Island, Kingston, RI, United States of America.
³ Department of Marine and Coastal Sciences, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, United States of America.
⁴ Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Natural Resources, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, United States of America.
⁵ Marine Biology Department, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel.
⁶ Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ, United States of America.

^# Contributed equally.

Abstract

We investigated intra- and inter-colony sequence variation in a population of the dominant Hawaiian coral Montipora capitata by analyzing marker gene and genomic data. Ribosomal ITS1 regions showed evidence of a reticulate history among the colonies, suggesting incomplete rDNA repeat homogenization. Analysis of the mitochondrial genome identified a major (M. capitata) and a minor (M. flabellata) haplotype in single polyp-derived sperm bundle DNA with some colonies containing 2-3 different mtDNA haplotypes. In contrast, Pax-C and newly identified single-copy nuclear genes showed either no sequence differences or minor variations in SNP frequencies segregating among the colonies. Our data suggest past mitochondrial introgression in M. capitata, whereas nuclear single-copy loci show limited variation, highlighting the divergent evolutionary histories of these coral DNA markers.

Keywords: Coral colonies; Genomics; Sperm bundle DNA.

Grants and funding

This work was made possible by grants from the National Science Foundation EF-1416785 awarded to P.G.F., T.M. and D.B, OCE-PRF 1323822 to H.M.P., and Hawaii EPSCoR EPS-0903833. Funding was also provided by the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation to R.D.G. and by the US-Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF-2014035) to D.K.A. and T.M. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.