[Coral-List] New paper on bacterial community shifts in coral mucus and tissue layers under thermal stress (Sonny TM Lee)

[sonny lee]

Dear fellow coral people,

Our recent work on hypothesis-driven experiment on bacterial community
shift in different compartments of the coral colony during bleaching has
just been published online in FEMS Microbiology Ecology

http://femsec.oxfordjournals.org/content/91/12/fiv142

Nubbins of *Acropora muricata* were subjected to increasing water
temperatures of 26°C–33°C, to simultaneously explore the bacterial
diversity in coral mucus and tissues by 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing. Both
the mucus and tissues of healthy *A. muricata* were dominated by γ-
*Proteobacteria*, but under thermal stress there was a shift towards
bacteria from the *Verrucomicrobiaceae* and α-*Proteobacteria*.
Members of*Cyanobacteria,
Flavobacteria* and *Sphingobacteria* also become more prominent at higher
temperatures. The relative abundance of *Vibrio* spp. in the coral mucus
increased at 29°C, but at 31°C, there was a drop in the relative abundance
of *Vibrio* spp. in the mucus, with a reciprocal increase in the tissues.
On the other hand, during bleaching, the relative abundance of
*Endozoicomonas* spp. decreased in the tissues with a reciprocal increase
in the mucus. This is the first systematic experiment that shows the
potential for a bacterial community shift between the coral surface mucus
and tissues in a thermally stressed coral.

Cheers,

Sonny
Regards,
Sonny T M Lee
PhD Candidate, University of Auckland

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