2 research outputs found
Ecological Inferences from a deep screening of the Complex Bacterial Consortia associated with the coral, Porites astreoides
14 páginas, 6 figuras, 3 tablas.The functional role of the bacterial organisms in the reef ecosystem and their contribution
to the coral well-being remain largely unclear. The first step in addressing this
gap of knowledge relies on in-depth characterization of the coral microbial community
and its changes in diversity across coral species, space and time. In this study, we
focused on the exploration of microbial community assemblages associated with an
ecologically important Caribbean scleractinian coral, Porites astreoides, using Illumina
high-throughput sequencing of the V5 fragment of 16S rRNA gene. We collected data
from a large set of biological replicates, allowing us to detect patterns of geographical
structure and resolve co-occurrence patterns using network analyses. The taxonomic
analysis of the resolved diversity showed consistent and dominant presence of two
OTUs affiliated with the order Oceanospirillales, which corroborates a specific pattern
of bacterial association emerging for this coral species and for many other corals
within the genus Porites. We argue that this specific association might indicate a symbiotic
association with the adult coral partner. Furthermore, we identified a highly
diverse rare bacterial ‘biosphere’ (725 OTUs) also living along with the dominant bacterial
symbionts, but the assemblage of this biosphere is significantly structured along
the geographical scale. We further discuss that some of these rare bacterial members
show significant association with other members of the community reflecting the complexity
of the networked consortia within the coral holobiont.This research
was funded by NSF-OCE grant (0851123) awarded to MRL.Peer reviewe