Genomic basis of coral resilience in a warming world

• Applicant: Professor Christian Voolstra, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Ecology and Biodiversity of Animals and Ecosystems, Organismic Interactions ; Evolution, Anthropology ; Microbial Ecology and Applied Microbiology
• Term: from 2020 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 433042944

Corals and the reef ecosystems they construct have been among the most sensitive to climate change, and coral bleaching (i.e., the loss of endosymbiotic microalgae due to water warming just 1-2°C above their mean summer maxima) is now the main driver of reef degradation. But corals have been shown to exhibit variation in their response to stress. The Seas around the Arabian Peninsula, in particular the Persian Gulf, represent one of the most stressful reef environments where coral live successfully and can be considered a test tube for ‘Future Oceans’. Using a newly developed portable experimental system, termed CBASS (the Coral Bleaching Automated Stress System), we here propose to (1) generate a standardized suite of phenotype diagnostics to identify individuals from four species of the coral genera Cyphastrea, Dipsastraea, and Porites across the Persian Gulf that resist or recover from bleaching better than others, and to (2) subject those to high-resolution transcriptional and genomics profiling using RNA-Seq and shallow whole genome sequencing (sWGS) to uncover the genes and allelic variants underlying resistant phenotypes, elucidate the molecular mechanisms of bleaching, and reveal the genomic underpinnings of coral resilience.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants