Profiling of bacterial communities present in corals of palk bay by 16S rRNA gene based metagenomic analysis.

Profiling the bacterial community at every understudied geographical location during various time periods will help the scientific community to predict the reef status of a particular locality by categorizing the corals as stress tolerant symbionts (McDevitt-Irwin et al., 2017). As bacteria exhibit more rapid acclimation to changing environment than corals due to their phenotypic plasticity, association with these rapidly evolving stress tolerant symbiont association with corals will also contribute to corals’ health and immunity (Webster and Blackall, 2009; Torda et al., 2017). Thus, the present study aims to profile the coral bacteriome composition among different coral genera (thermally-sensitive (Acropora) and thermally resistant (Favites abdita) coral genera analyzed by field monitoring surveys) and also in particular coral genera (thermally sensitive coral- Acropora) at two different sampling times in Palk Bay – South-East coast of India.

对不同时期内研究不足的各地理点位的细菌群落进行谱解析，可助力学界通过将珊瑚归类为耐胁迫共生体，进而预测特定区域的珊瑚礁健康状态（McDevitt-Irwin等，2017）。鉴于细菌具备表型可塑性，相较于珊瑚，其对环境变化的适应速率更快，因此珊瑚与这类快速演化的耐胁迫共生体的关联，同样有助于维持珊瑚的健康与免疫功能（Webster与Blackall，2009；Torda等，2017）。据此，本研究旨在解析两类样本的珊瑚细菌组组成：其一为经野外监测调查分析的不同珊瑚属类，包括热敏感型轴孔珊瑚属（Acropora）与耐热型标准蜂巢珊瑚（Favites abdita）；其二为印度东南海岸帕克湾（Palk Bay）内，于两个不同采样时间点采集的特定珊瑚属样本——热敏感型的轴孔珊瑚属（Acropora）。