Evaluate the methodology to detect stress proteins expression in corals exposed to drastic changes in the environment
Deborah Parrilla Hernández and Suhey Ortiz
Department of Biology, University of Puerto Rico-Humacao, 100 CARR 908, Postal
Station CUH, Humacao, Puerto Rico 00791 d_parrilla@webmail.uprh.edu
Coral reefs result from the interaction between symbiotic organisms composed of a dinoflagellate algae (zooxanthellae) and scleractinian corals. A central environmental issue in the context of global climate is the susceptibility of scleractinian corals to temperature changes, UV radiation and other natural and anthropogenic stress inducers.
Such perturbations are probably the causes for the reported observations over the past two decades, and especially in the 1990’s, when coral reef experienced extensive degradation worldwide. Most of these observations described the ‘bleaching’ phenomenon as an immediate response of corals to drastic change in their normal growth conditions. Bleaching is a process whereby corals and other invertebrates in symbiotic relationship with the dinoflagellate algae, lose them due to natural and anthropogenic changes in their normal growth conditions. This research used a molecular biomarker system, the stress proteins, to analyze specific parameters of coral cellular physiology and evaluate the methodology to detect stress proteins expression in corals. The Hsp 70 kit, which is an ELISA assay, proved to be an easy to implement method to analyze the presence and quantify the stress proteins expressed in corals under different temperature conditions and was less time consuming. Traditional methodology, which involve three steps: protein separation in SDS-PAGE, immunoblotting and immunodetection allowed the use of specific antibodies for different stress proteins: sp 90, sp 70, and sp 45 and small stress proteins 25 kDa, but this method proved to be tedious and time consuming compare with the ELISA-Hsp 70 kit.