Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2019 Aug;28(16):3830-3843.
doi: 10.1111/mec.15187. Epub 2019 Aug 10.

The roles of age, parentage and environment on bacterial and algal endosymbiont communities in Acropora corals

Wing Yan Chan  1   2 , Lesa M Peplow  1 , Patricia Menéndez  1   3 , Ary A Hoffmann  4 , Madeleine J H van Oppen  1   2
Affiliations

The roles of age, parentage and environment on bacterial and algal endosymbiont communities in Acropora corals

Wing Yan Chan et al. Mol Ecol. 2019 Aug.

Abstract

The bacterial and microalgal endosymbiont (Symbiodiniaceae spp.) communities associated with corals have important roles in their health and resilience, yet little is known about the factors driving their succession during early coral life stages. Using 16S rRNA gene and ITS2 metabarcoding, we compared these communities in four Acropora coral species and their hybrids obtained from two laboratory crosses (Acropora tenuis × Acropora loripes and Acropora sarmentosa × Acropora florida) across the parental, recruit (7 months old) and juvenile (2 years old) life stages. We tested whether microbiomes differed between (a) life stages, (b) hybrids and purebreds, and (c) treatment conditions (ambient/elevated temperature and pCO2 ). Microbial communities of early life stage corals were highly diverse, lacked host specificity and were primarily determined by treatment conditions. Over time, a winnowing process occurred, and distinct microbial communities developed between the two species pair crosses by 2 years of age, irrespective of hybrid or purebred status. These findings suggest that the microbial communities of corals have a period of flexibility prior to adulthood, which can be valuable to future research aimed at the manipulation of coral microbial communities.

Keywords: Acropora corals; Symbiodiniaceae; bacteria; holobiont; microbial community.

PubMed Disclaimer

References

REFERENCES

    1. Abrego, D., Ulstrup, K. E., Willis, B. L., & van Oppen, M. J. H. (2008). Species-specific interactions between algal endosymbionts and coral hosts define their bleaching response to heat and light stress. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences, 275(1648), 2273-2282. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2008.0180
    1. Abrego, D., van Oppen, M. J. H., & Willis, B. L. (2009). Onset of algal endosymbiont specificity varies among closely related species of Acropora corals during early ontogeny. Molecular Ecology, 18(16), 3532-3543. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-294X.2009.04276.x
    1. Amir, A., McDonald, D., Navas-Molina, J. A., Kopylova, E., Morton, J. T., Zech Xu, Z., … Knight, R. (2017). Deblur rapidly resolves single-nucleotide community sequence patterns. mSystems, 2(2), e00191-16. https://doi.org/10.1128/mSystems.00191-16
    1. Anderson, M. J., Ellingsen, K. E., & McArdle, B. H. (2006). Multivariate dispersion as a measure of beta diversity. Ecology Letters, 9(6), 683-693. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1461-0248.2006.00926.x
    1. Andrews, S. (2018). FastQC: A quality control tool for high throughput sequence data. Retrieved from http://www.bioinformatics.babraham.ac.uk/projects/fastqc

Publication types

Substances

LinkOut - more resources