gene expression plasticity Anolis apletophallus 2017
Tropical ectotherms are thought to be especially vulnerable to climate change because they have evolved in temporally stable thermal environments and thus have decreased tolerance for thermal variability. Thus, they are expected to have narrow thermal tolerance ranges, live close to their upper thermal tolerance limits, and have decreased thermal acclimation capacity. Although models often predict that tropical forest ectotherms are especially vulnerable to rapid environmental shifts, these models rarely include the potential for plasticity of relevant traits. We measured multi-tissue transcriptome plasticity in response to warmer temperatures in a species that previous work has suggested is highly vulnerable to climate warming, the Panamanian slender anole lizard Anolis apletophallus. In July of 2017, we captured 24 adult male lizards from the same field site described above and transported them back to the Smithsonian facility in Gamboa, Panama. After acclimation to laboratory conditions for 48 hours at 22C, lizards were introduced to three Percival incubators set to a warm 32C, control 28C, or cool 18C treatment n is 8 per treatment.The control treatment temperature was similar to the mean field-active body temperature for slender anoles. The warm treatment represents the higher end of body temperatures that slender anoles experience in the wild, as 1.1 of field-active body temperatures were above 30C. Finally, the cool treatment represents a temperature that slender anoles might experience during rare cold snaps that likely occur once every few generations. Each lizard was maintained at the treatment temperature for two hours before euthanasia by decapitation and immediate tissue collection of whole brain, liver, and femoral muscle. RNA was isolated from tissue using a Trizol reagent protocol, sent to the Georgia Genomics and Bioinformatics Core for preparation of complementary DNA libraries and sequenced on the NextSeq 500 Illumina platform. Sequences were mapped to the Anolis carolinensis reference genome because it was the closest relative with a published genome.