Miniaturized Platform for Individual Coral Polyps Culture and Monitoring

Yongsheng Luo,Chunpeng He,Xiaolin Lu,Zuhong Lu,Jinglun Zhao

doi:10.3390/mi11020127

Abstract

Methodologies for coral polyps culture and real-time monitoring are important in investigating the effects of the global environmental changes on coral reefs and marine biology. However, the traditional cultivation method is limited in its ability to provide a rapid and dynamic microenvironment to effectively exchange the chemical substances and simulate the natural environment change. Here, an integrated microdevice with continuous perfusion and temperature-control in the microenvironment was fabricated for dynamic individual coral polyps culture. For a realistic mimicry of the marine ecological environment, we constructed the micro-well based microfluidics platform that created a fluid flow environment with a low shear rate and high substance transfer, and developed a sensitive temperature control system for the long-term culture of individual coral polyps. This miniaturized platform was applied to study the individual coral polyps in response to the temperature change for evaluating the coral death caused by El Nino. The experimental results demonstrated that the microfluidics platform could provide the necessary growth environment for coral polyps as expected so that in turn the biological activity of individual coral polyps can quickly be recovered. The separation between the algae and host polyp cells were observed in the high culture temperature range and the coral polyp metabolism was negatively affected. We believe that our culture platform for individual coral polyps can provide a reliable analytical approach for model and mechanism investigations of coral bleaching and reef conservation.

Highlights

Coral reefs are an important component of the marine ecosystem, where they have a great impact on maintaining global dynamic ecological balance [1,2,3,4,5]
The miniaturized microfluidic culture platform consists of a number of different components, including culture chip for coral polyps, cover plate, and temperature controlling module
The fluid shear stress is a critical parameter under this study which directly affects the culture of the individual coral polyps [19,32]

Summary

Introduction

Coral reefs are an important component of the marine ecosystem, where they have a great impact on maintaining global dynamic ecological balance [1,2,3,4,5]. The existential crisis of coral reefs has arisen, as the marine environment is changing, including ocean acidification and seawater temperature increase, resulted from the high carbon dioxide levels and El Nino phenomenon [6,7]. For elevated seawater temperatures, which is driving the increase of coral bleaching and leading to the loss of coral cover in the whole world [8,9]. Understanding how elevated temperatures exacerbate the corals bleaching has significant implications for the coral reef conservation and recovery. The coral bleaching occurs when the symbiotic relationship is broken by external stresses, among which thermal stress is an important one. The bleaching mechanism due to the thermal stress effect is difficult to investigate because of the complex physiological connections to the metabolic process of the coral symbiotic systems [12,13,14]

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion