As environments are rapidly reshaped due to climate change, phenotypic plasticity plays an important role in the ability of organisms to persist and is considered an especially important acclimatization mechanism for long-lived sessile organisms such as reef-building corals. Often, this ability of a single genotype to display multiple phenotypes depending on the environment is modulated by changes in gene expression, which can vary in response to environmental changes via two mechanisms: baseline expression and expression plasticity. We used transcriptome-wide expression profiling of eleven genotypes of common-gardened Acropora cervicornis to explore genotypic variation in the expression response to thermal and acidification stress, both individually and in combination. We show that the combination of these two stressors elicits a synergistic gene expression response, and that both baseline expression and expression plasticity in response to stress show genotypic variation. Additionally, we demonstrate that frontloading of a large module of coexpressed genes is associated with greater retention of algal symbionts under combined stress. These results illustrate that variation in the gene expression response of individuals to climate change stressors can persist even when individuals have shared environmental histories, affecting their performance under future climate change scenarios.
Keywords: bleaching; climate change; coral; gene expression; phenotypic plasticity; synergistic stressors.