Contemplating Corals: Monitoring Indicators of Climate Change
Tuesday July 19, 2011
The Red Sea's coral reefs are both complex and stunning environments. They are extremely sensitive to rapid change in climate and also hold a wealth of untapped information on the health of the water's ecological systems.
In a move to explore this data, marine scientists at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) have undertaken research projects to study the corals. These include the development of a coral monitoring station to study the seasonal changes of the reefs and the use of specialized sequencing methods to obtain specific coral genome information.
The coral monitoring station, a plan by the University's Red Sea Research Center (RSRC), includes deploying monitoring buoys in Thallah and Al Fahal (respectively north and south of Thuwal), and will eventually expand to include a total of five or six reefs in the Thuwal region. Projecting further, a comparative approach will be implemented by incorporating environmentally impacted reefs around the Jeddah region.
The station will focus on microbial assemblage, stress, and bleaching patterns. This project is on track to be the largest coral reef tracking venture in the world. The collection of samples in the field will be integrated and analyzed with high-resolution molecular techniques through the monitoring of key environmental and ecological factors.
The incorporation of quantitative environmental data to the analysis of molecular datasets will enable a varied approach to identifying factors responsible for the differences seen in the diverse underwater environments. This perspective will add to the understanding of ecosystem phenotypes by elucidating ecosystems top-down and bottom-up (for example, from microbial community structure to physical oceanographic parameters).
Marine research on a global scale
The current work, also involving the University's Global Collaborative Research partners, has included observation and sampling in various Red Sea locations, from dive boats and coastal locations by divers.
This survey will provide comparative analyses of microbial communities, genetic capacities, and metabolic pathways throughout the Red Sea that can be exploited for pharmaceutical and biotechnological applications. This inventory will be used as a baseline to determine metabolic hot spots for more detailed analyses as well as culturing efforts, and to determine an ideal site for a microbial observatory.
Furthermore, a molecular analysis of microbial communities will provide a first insight into adaptations of microbes to the high temperature, high salinity, and low carbon content of the Red Sea.
Indicators of ocean vitality
Coral reefs are also major indicators of ecosystem health as they are incredibly sensitive to environmental changes. However, certain coral host algal symbiont combinations are better at withstanding ecological turmoil such as drastic shifts in temperature or turbidity.
In another RSRC project, Assistant Professor Christian R. Voolstra and his colleagues in the Coral Reef Ecological Genomics in the Red Sea group are studying coral-algal symbioses in the extreme environment of the Arabian Gulf to gather insight into the capacity of corals to persist and recover from rapid shifts in climate.
Voolstra is also using high-throughput de novo sequencing (a DNA sequencing method used to determine the order of nucleotide bases in DNA molecules) to obtain the genome of the coral Stylophora pistillata. Corals are representative of the phylum Cnidaria, and the genome sequence will lay the foundation for all further molecular studies of coral biology and could benefit coral resource management. A genome of the photosynthetic dinoflagellate Symbiodinium sp. will also be sequenced.
As a group, dinoflagellates have adapted to a broad range of environments and have a wide array of forms and nutrition sources. The eukaryotes can be free-living, but they can also be symbiotic (in corals, as Symbiodinium sp. is) or even predatory (for example, Pfiesteria, which preys on fish). Dinoflagellates are cousins to apicomplexans, which include the Plasmodium microorganism that causes malaria.
The genome of Symbiodinium sp. could potentially offer insights into the capacities, weaknesses, and evolution of parasitism and mutualism.
The RSRC is one of the University's nine research centers. It was inaugurated at the University's Red Sea Research symposium in April 2011.