Life Sciences Commons^™

Differential Patterns Of Microbiota Recovery In Symbiotic And Aposymbiotic Corals Following Antibiotic Disturbance, Shavonna M. Bent, Carolyn A. Miller, Koty H. Sharp, Colleen M. Hansel, Amy Apprill

Arts & Sciences Faculty Publications

Microbial relationships are critical to coral health, and changes in microbiomes are often exhibited following environmental disturbance. However, the dynamics of coral-microbial composition and external factors that govern coral microbiome assembly and response to disturbance remain largely uncharacterized. Here, we investigated how antibiotic-induced disturbance affects the coral mucus microbiota in the facultatively symbiotic temperate coral Astrangia poculata, which occurs naturally with high (symbiotic) or low (aposymbiotic) densities of the endosymbiotic dinoflagellate Breviolum psygmophilum. We also explored how differences in the mucus microbiome of natural and disturbed A. poculata colonies affected levels of extracellular superoxide, a reactive oxygen species thought to …