Research

Corals in the Persian/Arabian Gulf (PAG) have the highest known bleaching thresholds. Our research discovered that they form a stable association with a thermally tolerant symbiont, Cladocopium thermophilum, that is widespread across the southern PAG in both horizontally and vertically transmitting hosts. Our most recent work (Smith et al. 2022, Science Advances) has identified signatures of selection in the coral host associated with rapid adaptation to the PAG and highlights an intriguing interplay between the genome and epigenome in loci associated with thermal tolerance. 

The ITS2 region is commonly used to assess microbial community diversity, yet these analyses typically ignore the multicopy nature of this marker. Our research has shown that by incorporating ITS2 intragenomic variability into analyses, we can substantially improve the resolution of Symbiodiniaceae community analysis to reveal ecological patterns, such as host-specificity, that would otherwise be overlooked.  Automated intragenomic variant-based analyses for ITS2 amplicon datasets are now available through Symportal.org

Here, we show that imbalanced nutrient composition of reef waters alters the algal lipidome, resulting in increased susceptibility to temperature- and light-induced bleaching.