Investigating bacterial and Symbiodiniaceae communities associated with the octocoral Tubipora

The aim of this study was to characterize and describe the bacterial and Symbiodiniaceae communities associated with two species of the overlooked reef-building octocoral Tubipora in the central Saudi Arabian Red Sea, across their depth ranges of distribution. To do so, we used high-throughput sequencing of the V3-V4 region of the 16S rRNA gene for the bacterial communities and the ITS2 region for the Symbiodiniaceae communities.