Fig. 1: Experimental setup.
From: Microbiota mediated plasticity promotes thermal adaptation in the sea anemone Nematostella vectensis
A single female polyp from the standard culture conditions (16‰, 20 °C) was isolated and propagated via clonal reproduction. When a total of 150 clones was reached, they were split into 15 different culture boxes of 10 animals each. The boxes were put at three different acclimation temperatures (ATs) (15, 20, and 25 °C, n = 5) and the number of animals/box was kept equal to 50. Heat stress experiments (HS) (6 h, 40 °C) were performed at 40 (n = 10) and 132 (n = 5) weeks of acclimation (woa). Sexual reproduction was induced at 60 and 84 woa for the juvenile survival test (Surv_F1, n = 10) and the vertical transmission experiment (F0/F1, n = 5). At 40, 84 and 132 woa samples were collected for 16S sequencing (16S, n = 5); at 76 woa sampling for RNA sequencing was performed (n = 5).
