Transcriptomic responses of juvenile Pacific whiteleg shrimp, Litopenaeus vannamei, to hypoxia and hypercapnic hypoxia.

Estuarine crustaceans are often exposed to low dissolved O2 (hypoxia) accompanied by elevated CO2 (hypercapnia), which lowers water pH. Acclimatory responses to hypoxia have been widely characterized; responses to hypercapnia in combination with hypoxia (hypercapnic hypoxia) are less well known. Here we used oligonucleotide microarrays to characterize changes in global gene expression in the hepatopancreas of Pacific whiteleg shrimp, Litopenaeus vannamei, exposed to hypoxia or hypercapnic hypoxia for 4 or 24 h, compared with time-matched animals held in air-saturated water (normoxia). Unigenes whose expressions were significantly impacted by treatment and/or time were used to build artificial neural networks (ANNs) to identify genes with the greatest sensitivity in pairwise discriminations between treatments at each time point and between times for each treatment. ANN gene sets that discriminated hypoxia or hypercapnic hypoxia from normoxia shared functions of translation, mitochondrial energetics, and cellular defense. GO terms protein modification/phosphorylation/cellular protein metabolism and RNA processing/apoptosis/cell cycling occurred at highest frequency in discriminating hypercapnic hypoxia from hypoxia at 4 and 24 h, respectively. For 75.4% of the annotated ANN genes, exposure to hypercapnic hypoxia for 24 h reduced or reversed the transcriptional response to hypoxia alone. These results suggest that high CO2/low pH may interfere with transcriptionally based acclimation to hypoxia or elicit physiological or biochemical responses that relieve internal hypoxia. Whether these data reflect resilience or sensitivity of L. vannamei in the face of expanding hypoxic zones and rising levels of atmospheric CO2 may be important to understanding the survival of this and other estuarine species.