Coral
At the Two Frontiers Project, we specialize in building scientific tools for exploring the biology of remote frontiers. Our coral initiative is about building, testing, and deploying the methods we need to protect our planet’s coral reefs and optimize their restoration.
Climate change is exerting an unprecedented strain on coral reef ecosystems, which form the backbone of ecological diversity in our oceans. Corals provide a home for over 25% of oceanic fish species and additionally are a critical source of economic value for many countries’ fisheries and tourism industries. With increasing ocean temperatures due to climate change, corals are facing massive, worldwide bleaching events resulting in the deaths of entire ecosystems. These events are exacerbated by the fact that most corals are sessile and live close to the maximal temperature they can survive, indicating that slight changes can do massive damage. With ocean temperatures rising due to climate change, extinction is likely for at least 30% of modern coral species if nothing is done.
As a result, many recent efforts have aimed to determine how best we can protect corals – and therefore, our oceans writ large – against the extant threat of climate change. One promising avenue of research is the deployment of probiotic, Beneficial Microorganisms for Corals (BMCs). Via the combination of lab, tank-based, studies as well as limited field trials specific probiotic consortia have been shown, in some cases, to improve coral resilience to disease. Most recently, members of our team showed that, for certain species, the impact of a temperature increase of 10°C could be mitigated with a probiotic cocktail.
However, development of BMCs is impossible without first understanding the native microbes that live in and on corals. In this sense, optimizing BMC discovery is drastically hindered by the technology available to understand the complex microbial ecosystems of reefs. Specifically, the tools used for DNA sequencing on coral tissues are limited to those from before the advent of Next-Generation-Sequencing (NGS), which can be used for shotgun metagenomics, capturing all of the DNA in a given environmental sample. Piloting shotgun sequencing for corals has proven difficult because they (1) contain low microbiome biomass other than host (i.e., coral) tissue and (2) de-convolving host DNA from microbiome DNA is difficult due to a lack of high-quality genome databases and various features of coral DNA itself.
We are building a set of tools — and testing them on corals from around the world — for characterizing, isolating, and engineering the microbial communities of coral reefs to build precision, optimized treatments to protect them from bleaching.
