Genomic and single-cell approaches to establish the molecular basis of stony coral resilience to climate change-related stressors.

Scleractinian corals are the main builders of the marine reefs that provide a home to roughly a quarter of all marine species.

In addition, their photosynthetic symbionts contribute to Earths oxygen, absorb CO2 from the atmosphere, and provide the coral host with most of its metabolic needs. Global changes drastically affecting ocean acidification and temperatures cause the breakdown of this symbiosis. This process is also known as coral bleaching, and it results in a mass decline in coral reefs.

Despite the continuous efforts to study this phenomenon, our understanding of the bleaching process is so far limited.

It is important to emphasize that different coral species, display distinct responses to stressors, with varying mortality rates following bleaching.

Hence, in this action, I will utilize these differences in coral resilience (i) to characterize the cellular and molecular responses to stressors of three corals with different levels of bleaching resilience (Stylophora pistillata, Acropora millepora, and Oculina patagonica); (ii) to identify specific genes that might be key players in coral resilience, and (iii) to design and test pharmacological interventions to modulate coral resilience to thermal and acidification stress.

To do so, I will expose corals to thermal and acidification stressors and use single-cell genomics approaches to measure and compare cell type-specific gene expression responses to stressors within and between species.

These analyses will highlight candidate molecular pathways and cellular processes responsible for the high resilience of some of these species.

Together, this project will provide a high-resolution molecular map of stony coral responses to climate change-related stressors, and it will help me, and others advance towards targeted interventions to ameliorate these effects.