Abstract
Global threats to reefs require urgent efforts to resolve coral attributes that affect survival in a changing environment. Genetically different individuals of the same coral species are known to exhibit different responses to the same environmental conditions. New information on coral physiology, particularly as it relates to genotype, could aid in unraveling mechanisms that facilitate coral survival in the face of stressors. Metabolomic profiling detects a large subset of metabolites in an organism, and, when linked to metabolic pathways, can provide a snapshot of an organism’s physiological state. Identifying metabolites associated with desirable, genotype-specific traits could improve coral selection for restoration and other interventions. A key step toward this goal is determining whether intraspecific variation in coral metabolite profiles can be detected for species of interest, however little information exists to illustrate such differences. To address this gap, we applied untargeted 1H-NMR and LC-MS metabolomic profiling to three genotypes of the threatened coral Acropora cervicornis. Both methods revealed distinct metabolite “fingerprints” for each genotype examined. A number of metabolites driving separation among genotypes were identified or putatively annotated. Pathway analysis suggested differences in protein synthesis among genotypes. For the first time, these data illustrate intraspecific variation in metabolomic profiles for corals in a common garden. Our results contribute to the growing body of work on coral metabolomics and suggest future work could identify specific links between phenotype and metabolite profile in corals.
Highlights
The global decline of coral reefs demands novel tools to understand these ecosystems and their ability to persist under present and future environmental conditions[1,2,3]
A False Discovery Rate (FDR) corrected analysis of variance (ANOVA) model found 59 chemical shifts, representing signals derived from coral metabolites that differed significantly among genotypes (p < 0.05)
As a first step toward this goal, we tested whether metabolomic profiles vary among unique genotypes of the staghorn coral A. cervicornis in a common garden
Summary
The global decline of coral reefs demands novel tools to understand these ecosystems and their ability to persist under present and future environmental conditions[1,2,3]. Physiological responses in corals can be complex, given that corals are holobionts, comprised of the host organism, photosynthetic dinoflagellate symbionts, and an associated microbial community[18]. Variation in metabolomic profiles among genotypes is prerequisite to screen for desirable traits like disease resistance using specific metabolite biomarkers[29] Such strategies could extend to corals, which have been shown to possess intraspecific variation in key traits that could affect fitness[9,10,25,26,30,31]. LC-MS is far more sensitive, and can resolve a higher number of metabolites, less abundant compounds like secondary metabolites[33] Application of both 1H-NMR and LC-MS in tandem improves coverage of the metabolome and enhances both metabolite resolution and identification. These data increase our basic knowledge of the coral metabolome and represent an important step toward linking genotype, phenotype, and metabolome in reef-building corals
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