As climate change progresses, reef‐building corals must contend more often with suboptimal conditions, motivating a need to understand coral stress response. Here, we test the hypothesis that there is a stereotyped transcriptional response that corals enact under all stressful conditions, functionally characterized by downregulation of growth, and activation of cell death, response to reactive oxygen species, immunity, and protein folding and degradation. We analyse RNA‐seq and Tag‐Seq data from 14 previously published studies and supplement them with four new experiments involving different stressors, totaling over 600 gene expression profiles from the genus Acropora . Contrary to expectations, we found not one, but two distinct types of response. The type A response was observed under all kinds of high‐intensity stress, was correlated between independent projects and was functionally consistent with the hypothesized stereotyped response. The consistent correlation between projects, irrespective of stress type, supports the type A response as the general coral environmental stress response (ESR), a blanket solution to severely stressful conditions. The distinct type B response was observed under lower intensity stress and was more variable among studies. Unexpectedly, at the level of individual genes and functional categories, the type B response was broadly opposite the type A response. Finally, taking advantage of the breadth of the data set, we present contextual annotations for previously unannotated genes based on consistent stress‐induced differences across independent projects.

中文翻译：

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珊瑚对环境压力反应的荟萃分析：根据压力强度，鹿角珊瑚显示出相反的反应。

随着气候变化的发展，造礁珊瑚必须在次优条件下进行更频繁的竞争，这激发了对珊瑚压力反应的了解。在这里，我们测试了一个假说，即在所有压力条件下，珊瑚都会产生定型的转录反应，其功能特征在于生长的下调和细胞死亡的激活，对活性氧的反应，免疫力以及蛋白质折叠和降解的反应。我们分析了14个先前发表的研究中的RNA-seq和Tag-Seq数据，并用涉及不同压力源的四个新实验对其进行了补充，这些实验总共来自Acropora属的600多个基因表达谱。与期望相反，我们发现不是一种响应，而是两种截然不同的响应。在各种高强度压力下均观察到A型反应，与独立项目之间存在关联，并且在功能上与假设的定型反应一致。无论压力类型如何，项目之间的一致性都支持A类响应，即一般的珊瑚环境压力响应（ESR），这是对严重压力条件的全面解决方案。在较低的强度压力下观察到明显的B型反应，并且在研究之间变化更大。出乎意料的是，在单个基因和功能类别的水平上，B型反应与A型反应大致相反。最后，利用数据集的广度，