| Abstract: | Global change is altering the climate that species have historically adapted to – in some cases at a pace not recently experienced in their evolutionary history – with cascading effects on all taxa. A central aim in global change biology is to understand how specific populations may be “primed” for global change, either through acclimation or adaptive standing genetic variation. It is therefore an important goal to link physiological measurements to the degree of stress a population experiences (Annual Review of Marine Science, 2012, 4, 39). Although “omic” approaches such as gene expression are often used as a proxy for the amount of stress experienced, we still have a poor understanding of how gene expression affects ecologically and physiologically relevant traits in non‐model organisms. In a From the Cover paper in this issue of Molecular Ecology, Griffiths, Pan and Kelley (Molecular Ecology, 2019, 28) link gene expression to physiological traits in a temperate marine coral. They discover population‐specific responses to ocean acidification for two populations that originated from locations with different histories of exposure to acidification. By integrating physiological and gene expression data, they were able to elucidate the mechanisms that explain these population‐specific responses. Their results give insight into the physiogenomic feedbacks that may prime organisms or make them unfit for ocean global change. |
