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. 2025 Sep;43(9):2232-2250.
doi: 10.1016/j.tibtech.2025.03.019. Epub 2025 May 14.

Biomimetic chemical microhabitats enhance coral settlement

Samapti Kundu  1 , Simone Potenti  2 , Zachary A Quinlan  3 , Helena Willard  4 , Justin Chen  5 , Timothy Noritake  5 , Natalie Levy  1 , Zahra Karimi  5 , Hendrikje Jorissen  6 , Joshua R Hancock  6 , Crawford Drury  6 , Linda Wegley Kelly  7 , Luisa De Cola  8 , Shaochen Chen  5 ; R3D consortium; Daniel Wangpraseurt  9
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Free article

Biomimetic chemical microhabitats enhance coral settlement

Samapti Kundu et al. Trends Biotechnol. 2025 Sep.
Free article

Abstract

Anthropogenic stressors pose substantial threats to the existence of coral reefs. Achieving successful coral recruitment stands as a bottleneck in reef restoration and hybrid reef engineering efforts. Here, we enhance coral settlement through the development of biomimetic microhabitats that replicate the chemical landscape of healthy reefs. We engineered a soft biomaterial, SNAP-X, comprising silica nanoparticles (NPs), biopolymers, and algal exometabolites, to enrich reef microhabitats with bioactive molecules from crustose coralline algae (CCA). Coral settlement was enhanced over 20-fold using SNAP-X-coated substrates compared with uncoated controls. SNAP-X is designed to release chemical signals slowly (>1 month) under natural seawater conditions, and can be rapidly applied to natural reef substrates via photopolymerization, facilitating the light-assisted 3D printing of microengineered habitats. We anticipate that these biomimetic chemical microhabitats will be widely used to augment coral settlement on degraded reefs and to support ecosystem processes on hybrid reefs.

Keywords: biomaterials; chemical signaling; coral reefs; recruitment; restoration.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of interests While no competing interests exist for any of the authors, the following information is provided for the sake of full transparency: D.W., S.K., S.C., and L.W.K. are authors on a provisional patent application related to this work. D.W. is founder of Hybrid Reef Solutions and is an advisory board member of the Coral Restoration Consortium, community practice for reef restoration. The authors declare that they have no other competing interests.

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