Sea fan collection and husbandry
Twelve G. ventalina individuals were collected at Laurel Patch Reef, La Parguera, Puerto Rico in May 2010. Sea fans were cut into two, 6x9 cm pieces, and suspended in situ to heal on the reef for three days. Sea fans were then collected from the reef and moved into static 38 L aquariums at the University of Puerto Rico, Isla Magueyes Laboratories in La Parguera, PR. Fans were distributed equally, in a clonally replicated design, between six aquariums (n=4 sea fans per aquarium with sea fan specimens 1-4, 5-8, 9-12 held in individual aquariums in duplicate). Sea fans were acclimated for two days and water was changed twice daily.
Experimental Inoculations
One piece of each sea fan (n=12) was injected three times with a solution of a 5 day culture of an Aplanochytrium previously isolated from a sea fan. Complementary clonal pieces (n=12) were injected with QPX media only to serve as a control. After 24 hours, an area including each of the three injection points was collected from each sea fan and flash frozen in liquid nitrogen and subsequently stored at -80 C. Sea fan samples were shipped on dry ice overnight to Cornell University and stored at -80 C until sample preparation.
Sample preparation
Each individual sea fan sample was ground in liquid nitrogen using a mortar and pestle, and the resulting powder was placed in a 2.0 mL microcentrifuge tube. Total RNA was extracted using a modified Trizol/Qiagen RNeasy protocol, whereby following the ethanol precipitation step of the Trizol manufacturer's instructions (Invitrogen, The Life Technologies CorporationTM, Grand Island, NY ), the aqueous solution was added to an RNeasy column, and the Qiagen RNeasy manufacturer's instructions were subsequently followed (Qiagen, Valencia, California). DNA was removed from extracted RNA using the Turbo DNA-free treatment according to the manufacturer's instructions (Ambion Inc, The Life Technologies CorporationTM, Grand Island, NY). Removal of DNA was confirmed by using RNA (1 µl) as template in a PCR reaction targeting 18s ribosomal DNA as previously described. RNA concentrations were quantified using the NanoDrop ND-1000 (NanoDrop Technologies, Wilmington, DE).
Sequencing and Analysis
For each treatment, samples were pooled (n=12) using 900 ng of total RNA from each sea fan. RNA quality was assessed using an Agilent BioAnalyzer 2100 at the Cornell University Life Sciences Core Laboratory Center (CLC). Library preparation was done at the Cornell Microarray facility using the mRNA-Seq 8-Sample Prep Kit (Illumina, San Diego, California) followed by sequencing preparation using the standard cluster generation kit and 36 cycle Illumnia sequencing kit (Illumina, San Diego, California) at the Cornell University CLC. Each library was sequenced in its own individual lane where 86 bp reads were captured using an Illumina/Solexa Genome Analyzer at the Cornell University CLC. The data have been deposited in NCBI's Gene Expression Omnibus.