Abstract
Since 2014, corals within Florida’s Coral Reef have been dying at an unprecedented rate due to stony coral tissue loss disease (SCTLD). Here we describe the transcriptomic outcomes of three different SCTLD transmission experiments performed at the Smithsonian Marine Station and Mote Marine Laboratory between 2019 and 2020 on the corals Orbicella faveolata and Montastraea cavernosa. Overall, diseased O. faveolata had 2194 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) compared with healthy colonies, whereas diseased M. cavernosa had 582 DEGs compared with healthy colonies. Many significant DEGs were implicated in immunity, extracellular matrix rearrangement, and apoptosis. These included, but not limited to, peroxidases, collagens, Bax-like, fibrinogen-like, protein tyrosine kinase, and transforming growth factor beta. A gene module was identified that was significantly correlated to disease transmission. This module possessed many apoptosis and immune genes with high module membership indicating that a complex apoptosis and immune response is occurring in corals during SCTLD transmission. Overall, we found that O. faveolata and M. cavernosa exhibit an immune, apoptosis, and tissue rearrangement response to SCTLD. We propose that future studies should focus on examining early time points of infection, before the presence of lesions, to understand the activating mechanisms involved in SCTLD.
Highlights
Florida’s Coral Reef (FCR) is a fragile and highly endangered reef system that has been impacted by numerous coral disease outbreaks (Holden, 1996; Richardson et al, 1998; Porter et al, 2001)
We found that treatment was a greater
Studies should focus on testing earlier time points of infection before the physical manifestation of the lesion, as this may give more information into the activating mechanisms involved in stony coral tissue loss disease (SCTLD)
Summary
Florida’s Coral Reef (FCR) is a fragile and highly endangered reef system that has been impacted by numerous coral disease outbreaks (Holden, 1996; Richardson et al, 1998; Porter et al, 2001). Lapointe et al, 2019) frequent hurricanes (Gardner et al, 2005) and intensified bleaching events due to global climate change (Kuffner et al, 2015; Manzello, 2015) In addition to these compounding threats, boulder, and brain coral populations on FCR face significant additional mortality to a newly emerging disease. Since 2014, FCR, and the Caribbean at large, have been experiencing an unprecedented disease outbreak that has culminated in extensive coral loss of already depauperate reef systems (Walton et al, 2018; Alvarez-Filip et al, 2019; EstradaSaldívar et al, 2020) This disease, termed stony coral tissue loss disease (SCTLD), affects over 21 species of mounding/bouldering corals and does not appear to affect Caribbean Acropora or Porites species (Skrivanek and Wusinich-Mendez, 2020). There is high intra- and interspecific variation in coral bacterial communities, rendering the identification of a putative bacterial causative agent challenging
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