Within-colony color variation in a chalice coral is associated with region-specific pigment expression and higher photoconvertible pigment transcripts

In a single green-and-orange chalice coral colony, the orange oral region shows higher expression of orange pigment transcripts and green-to-red photoconvertible EosFP-family proteins than the green body.

• Why it matters: Within-colony color differences occur despite shared genetic background, so the key gap is identifying the regulatory transcriptional programs that generate distinct tissue colors.
• What they did: The study sampled the green body, orange oral region, and a transition region, then performed end-to-end de novo holobiont transcriptome assembly from paired-end RNA-seq, separating coral host from dinoflagellate symbiont transcripts.
• The result: Host-only normalization corrected for regional symbiont read fraction, revealing region-specific up-regulation of distinct orange fluorescent-protein and chromoprotein transcripts and higher EosFP-family photoconvertible transcripts, implying photoconversion may contribute to coloration.

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