Seawater carbonate chemistry and cellular and molecular changes in hemolymph and extrapallial fluid in Mercenaria mercenaria

DOI

Seawater pH and carbonate saturation are predicted to decrease dramatically by the end of the century. This process, designated ocean acidification (OA), threatens economically and ecologically important marine calcifiers, including the northern quahog (Mercenaria mercenaria). While many studies have demonstrated the adverse impacts of OA on bivalves, much less is known about mechanisms of resilience and adaptive strategies. Here, we examined clam responses to OA by evaluating cellular (hemocyte activities) and molecular (high-throughput proteomics, RNASeq) changes in hemolymph and extrapallial fluid (EPF—the site of biomineralization located between the mantle and the shell) in M. mercenaria continuously exposed to acidified (pH 7.3; pCO2 2700 ppm) and normal conditions (pH 8.1; pCO2 600 ppm) for one year. The extracellular pH of EPF and hemolymph (7.5) was significantly higher than that of the external acidified seawater (7.3). Under OA conditions, granulocytes (a sub-population of hemocytes important for biomineralization) were able to increase intracellular pH (by 54% in EPF and 79% in hemolymph) and calcium content (by 56% in hemolymph). The increased pH of EPF and hemolymph from clams exposed to high pCO2 was associated with the overexpression of genes (at both the mRNA and protein levels) related to biomineralization, acid–base balance, and calcium homeostasis, suggesting that clams can use corrective mechanisms to mitigate the negative impact of OA.

In order to allow full comparability with other ocean acidification data sets, the R package seacarb (Gattuso et al, 2022) was used to compute a complete and consistent set of carbonate system variables, as described by Nisumaa et al. (2010). In this dataset the original values were archived in addition with the recalculated parameters (see related PI). The date of carbonate chemistry calculation by seacarb is 2023-04-20.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.957785
Related Identifier https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms232416066
Related Identifier https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/seacarb/index.html
Metadata Access https://ws.pangaea.de/oai/provider?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=datacite4&identifier=oai:pangaea.de:doi:10.1594/PANGAEA.957785
Provenance
Creator Schwaner, Caroline; Farhat, Sarah ORCID logo; Haley, John ORCID logo; Espinosa, Emmanuelle Pales ORCID logo; Allam, Bassem ORCID logo
Publisher PANGAEA
Contributor Yang, Yan
Publication Year 2023
Rights Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International; https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
OpenAccess true
Representation
Resource Type Dataset
Format text/tab-separated-values
Size 640 data points
Discipline Immunology; Life Sciences; Medicine; Microbiology, Virology and Immunology