[Coral-List] New paper - Filamentous virus-like particles are present in coral dinoflagellates across genera and ocean basins

[Adrienne Simoes Correa]

Hello Coral-Listers!

I would like to share a paper out in The ISME Journal (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41396-023-01526-6 <https://www.nature.com/articles/s41396-023-01526-6>) led by Dr. Lauren Howe-Kerr (Minderoo Foundation) that shows a diversity of Pacific coral symbionts contain filamentous virus-like particles (fVLPs). More Symbiodiniaceae cells with fVLPs were observed in corals sampled during a marine heatwave and also found in symbionts expelled from corals. Filamentous viruses have been hypothesized recently to be associated with stony coral tissue loss disease (SCTLD) but our findings indicate fVLPs are not exclusive to SCTLD-affected reef regions: we compare South Pacific fVLPs to those described in the foundational paper by Work et al. (2021) from SCTLD infected & non-infected corals from Florida (USA). We detected fVLPs in corals dominated by Breviolum, Cladocopium or Durusdinium lineages. Folks might also be interested in the symbiont capture devices we deployed in this study in aquariums and on the reef to catch symbionts expelled from Acropora (see the paper's Supp Mat for images of devices). Also available in the Supplemental Material for this paper are  transmission electron microscopy images of over 700 Symbiodiniaceae cells from a total of 35 coral colonies. We hope additional uses of these images will be found by the field! 

All the best,
Adrienne

Adrienne M.S. Correa (she/they)
Assistant Professor
Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management
University of California, Berkeley

https://nature.berkeley.edu/~amsc/
Bluesky: @adriennecorrea.bsky.social

Berkeley sits on Ohlone land <https://cejce.berkeley.edu/ohloneland>