Platax 9: 1-24, 2012 Temporal variation in nucleic acid and protein ratios in four anthozoan-dinoflagella te endosymbioses of the Indo-Pacific: implications for molecular diagnostics 1* 1 Anderson B. Mayfield , Yi-Yuong Hsiao , Tung-Yung Fan1,2, Chii-Shiarng Chen1,3,4,5 1 National Museum of Marine Biology and Aquarium, Checheng, Pingtung 944, Taiwan, R.O.C. 2 Graduate Institute of Marine Biodiversity and Evolution, National Dong-Hwa University, Checheng, Pingtung 944, Taiwan, R.O.C. 3 Graduate Institute of Marine Biotechnology, National Dong-Hwa University, Checheng, Pingtung 944, Taiwan, R.O.C. 4 Taiwan Coral Research Center, Checheng, Pingtung 944, Taiwan, R.O.C. 5 Department of Marine Biotechnology and Resources, National Sun Yat-Sen University, Kaohsiung 804, Taiwan, R.O.C. *Corresponding author, email:
[email protected] Abstract Given the threat of global climate change towards coral reefs and the endosymbiotic anthozoans that construct them, there is an urgent need to better understand the physiological response of these environmentally sensitive organisms. Unfortunately, many aspects of anthozoan biology are poorly understood, such as the cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying the stability of their association with dinoflagellates of the genus Symbiodinium. For instance, it has only recently been demonstrated that the molecular composition of these mutualisms is temporally variable; specifically, Symbiodinium DNA content has been shown to vary significantly across the light-dark cycle, and such variation could have implications for normalization of macromolecular expression data. For that reason, there was an interest in better understanding both spatio-temporal and interspecific variation in the concentrations of nucleic acids and pr oteins in reef-building corals and endosymbiotic sea anemones.