Microorganisms in terrestrial and marine ecosystems are essential to environmental sustainability. In the marine environment, invertebrates often depend on metabolic cooperation with their endosymbionts. Coral reefs, one of the most important marine ecosystems, are based on the symbiosis between a broad diversity of dinoflagellates of the genus Symbiodinium and a wide phyletic diversity of host...

The dinoflagellates are a large group of unicellular alge in marine and fresh water. Some are an endosymbiont of marine animals. Photosynthetic dinoflagellates have peridinin, a light-harvesting carotenoid. In addition, a unique carotenoid, P457, was found from Amphinidium. The presence of P457 in Symbiodinium derived from marine animals has not been reported. We reconfirmed the molecular struc...

Parental effects are ubiquitous in nature and in many organisms play a particularly critical role in the transfer of symbionts across generations; however, their influence and relative importance in the marine environment has rarely been considered. Coral reefs are biologically diverse and productive marine ecosystems, whose success is framed by symbiosis between reef-building corals and unicel...

Corals host diverse microbial communities that are involved in acclimatization, pathogen defense, and nutrient cycling. Surveys of coral-associated microbes have been particularly directed toward Symbiodinium and bacteria. However, a holistic understanding of the total microbiome has been hindered by a lack of analyses bridging taxonomically disparate groups. Using high-throughput amplicon sequ...

Most reef-building corals in the order Scleractinia depend on endosymbiotic algae in the genus Symbiodinium for energy and survival. Significant levels of taxonomic diversity in both partners result in numerous possible combinations of coral-Symbiodinium associations with unique functional characteristics. We created and analyzed the first coral-Symbiodinium networks utilizing a global dataset ...

Although rising ocean temperatures threaten scleractinian corals and the reefs they construct, certain reef corals can acclimate to elevated temperatures to which they are rarely exposed in situ. Specimens of the model Indo-Pacific reef coral Pocillopora damicornis collected from upwelling reefs of Southern Taiwan were previously found to have survived a 36-week exposure to 30°C, a temperature ...

Warmer than average summer sea surface temperature is one of the main drivers for coral bleaching, which describes the loss of endosymbiotic dinoflagellates (genus: Symbiodinium) in reef-building corals. Past research has established that oxidative stress in the symbiont plays an important part in the bleaching cascade. Corals hosting different genotypes of Symbiodinium may have varying thermal...

The identity and diversity of algal symbionts (Symbiodinium spp.) in reef corals is thought to influence to the resilience of reef ecosystems to climate change, and varies depending on coral species, environmental conditions, and biogeography. We examined these factors by surveying corals along a latitudinal gradient in Western Australia on reefs connected north to south by the warm-water Leeuw...

The diversity of endosymbiotic dinoflagellates (Symbiodinium) in corals at Johnston Atoll in the central Pacific Ocean was assessed using both the internal transcribed spacer 2 (ITS2) region of the nuclear rDNA and chloroplast 23S rDNA. More sequences were recovered from corals using the ITS2 primers than with the chloroplast 23S primers, a finding that reflects both the higher taxonomic resolu...

AIM Coral reefs rely on the symbiosis between scleractinian corals and intracellular, photosynthetic dinoflagellates of the genus Symbiodinium making the assessment of symbiont diversity critical to our understanding of ecological resilience of these ecosystems. This study characterizes Symbiodinium diversity around the Arabian Peninsula, which contains some of the most thermally diverse and un...