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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Mar. Sci.
Sec. Marine Biology
Volume 12 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fmars.2025.1579913
Stress memory and epigenome variations: insights into the thermal tolerance potential of Cladocora caespitosa (Linnaeus, 1767), a Mediterranean hermatypic coral
Provisionally accepted
Luca Bisanti
Claudia La Corte
Mariano Dara
Federica BertiniGabriele Rizzuto
Rossella Valenti
Flores NaselliDaniela Parrinello
M. Giovanna Parisi
Agostino Tomasello
Fabio Caradonna
Renato Chemello
Matteo Cammarata*- University of Palermo, Palermo, Italy
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Stress memory is a key ecological and evolutionary response for sessile organisms under changing environmental conditions, but the ubiquity of this phenomenon among coral species and habitat is unknown. We exposed colonies of the Mediterranean coral Cladocora caespitosa to two short-term thermal profiles (constant high and pulse) and quantified the genome-wide DNA methylation level before stress testing 75 days later. Here we show that a protective effect could be induced using short-term thermal profiles, which significantly improved immune tolerance and bleaching resistance. We found a significant relationship between genomic methylation levels and accumulated thermal stress by corals, preliminarily suggesting an epigenetic regulation dynamic of temperate coral tolerance in response to climate change. Our results represent new mechanistic insights into the stress memory of Mediterranean corals, supporting a role for DNA methylation in crucial cryptic complexity of plasticity avenues.
Keywords: Climate Change, priming, Coral Immunity, epigenetics, DNA-Methylation
Received: 19 Feb 2025; Accepted: 27 Mar 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Bisanti, La Corte, Dara, Bertini, Rizzuto, Valenti, Naselli, Parrinello, Parisi, Tomasello, Caradonna, Chemello and Cammarata. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Matteo Cammarata, University of Palermo, Palermo, Italy
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