Comparative analysis of bacterial communities associated with healthy and diseased corals in the Indonesian sea
- Publication date
- Publisher
- Peer J
Abstract
Coral reef ecosystems are impacted by climate change and human activities, such as
increasing coastal development, overfishing, sewage and other pollutant discharge,
and consequent eutrophication, which triggers increasing incidents of diseases and
deterioration of corals worldwide. In this study, bacterial communities associated with
four species of corals: Acropora aspera, Acropora formosa, Cyphastrea sp., and Isopora
sp. in the healthy and disease stages with different diseases were compared using
tagged 16S rRNA sequencing. In total, 59 bacterial phyla, 190 orders, and 307 genera
were assigned in coral metagenomes where Proteobacteria and Firmicutes were predominated
followed by Bacteroidetes together with Actinobacteria, Fusobacteria, and
Lentisphaerae as minor taxa. Principal Coordinates Analysis (PCoA) showed separated
clustering of bacterial diversity in healthy and infected groups for individual coral
species. Fusibacter was found as the major bacterial genus across all corals. The lower
number of Fusibacter was found in A. aspera infected with white band disease and
Isopora sp. with white plaque disease, but marked increases of Vibrio and Acrobacter,
respectively, were observed. This was in contrast to A. formosa infected by a black
band and Cyphastrea sp. infected by yellow blotch diseases which showed an increasing
abundance of Fusibacter but a decrease in WH1-8 bacteria. Overall, infection was shown
to result in disturbance in the complexity and structure of the associated bacterial
microbiomes which can be relevant to the pathogenicity of the microbes associated
with infected corals