Marine Biology Commons^™

Transcriptome Deep-Sequencing And Clustering Of Expressed Isoforms From Favia Corals, Shaadi F. Pooyaei Mehr, Rob Desalle, Hung-Teh Kao, Apurva Narechania, Zhou Han, Dan Tchernov, Vincent A. Pieribone, David F. Gruber

Publications and Research

Background: Genomic and transcriptomic sequence data are essential tools for tackling ecological problems. Using an approach that combines next-generation sequencing, de novo transcriptome assembly, gene annotation and synthetic gene construction, we identify and cluster the protein families from Favia corals from the northern Red Sea.

Results: We obtained 80 million 75 bp paired-end cDNA reads from two Favia adult samples collected at 65 m (Fav1, Fav2) on the Illumina GA platform, and generated two de novo assemblies using ABySS and CAP3. After removing redundancy and filtering out low quality reads, our transcriptome datasets contained 58,268 (Fav1) and 62,469 (Fav2) contigs …

Disturbance Driven Colony Fragmentation As A Driver Of A Coral Disease Outbreak, Marilyn E. Brandt, Tyler B. Smith, Adrienne M.S. Correa, Rebecca Vega-Thurber

Department of Biological Sciences

In September of 2010, Brewer's Bay reef, located in St. Thomas (U.S. Virgin Islands), was simultaneously affected by abnormally high temperatures and the passage of a hurricane that resulted in the mass bleaching and fragmentation of its coral community. An outbreak of a rapid tissue loss disease among coral colonies was associated with these two disturbances. Gross lesion signs and lesion progression rates indicated that the disease was most similar to the Caribbean coral disease white plague type 1. Experiments indicated that the disease was transmissible through direct contact between colonies, and five-meter radial transects showed a clustered spatial distribution …