Data sources
We chose two studies (Rose et al., 2015;Barshis et al., 2013) for this analysis by searching for the genus, Acropora, in the NCBI SRA database, comprising 181 coral samples sequenced with RNA-seq method. These studies were selected because they involved similar heat stress experiments on Acropora hyacinthus corals. Furthermore, these corals were all isolated from back reef tide pools in Ofu, American Samoa. The SRA metadata tables for each study are shown in supplemental table S1.