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Center for Coastal and Watershed Studies |
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Discovering Archaea Associated With Corals
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To determine if there were archaea associated with tropical corals, mucus was collected from three species of reefbuilding corals in the U.S. Virgin Islands: Montastraea annularis complex, Diploria strigosa, and Diploria labyrinthiformis. Total microbial DNA was extracted from the coral-mucus samples, purified, and analyzed by molecular techniques. The resulting archaeal DNA fragments were sequenced and identified by comparison to known sequences in GenBank, an international repository for sequence information. A diverse archaeal community was detected in each of the mucus samples. Most of the coral-associated archaeal sequences were most closely related to archaea previously detected in marine waters. The remaining sequences were similar to archaea detected in marine sediment and hydrothermal vents. A few sequences were distinctive enough to be considered novel. Unlike previous bacterial studies, which found specific associations between certain bacterial and coral species, this study found that archaea seem to be generalists, with the main types detected being observed in all three coral species tested. Finding archaea, with their varied (and, for the uncultivated specimens, mostly unknown) metabolic capabilities, adds to the likelihood of unique biogeochemical processes occurring in the microbial communities associated with corals. This work was done in cooperation with the Virgin Islands National Park and was published in the journal Marine Ecology Progress Series (Kellogg, 2004) article "Tropical Archaea: diversity associated with the surface microlayer of corals."
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