Diploria labyrinthiformis Stony Coral Tissue Loss Disease (SCTLD) Study

In Bayahibe, Dominican Republic, the reef-building coral Diploria labyrinthiformis has experienced severe mortality due to Stony Coral Tissue Loss Disease (SCTLD), a rapidly spreading and highly lethal disease. Although SCTLD originated in Florida and has since spread throughout the Caribbean, its etiology remains poorly understood. In this study, we sampled tissues from both healthy and visibly infected coral colonies. Infected colonies were further sub-sampled into apparently healthy and disease lesion tissues (n = 5 per group, total = 15 samples). Metagenomic sequencing was performed on all samples, generating approximately 90 Gbp of data per sample. The resulting reads were assembled and binned to recover metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs) representing prokaryotic, eukaryotic, viral, and plasmid lineages. Differential abundance analysis was conducted to identify MAGs significantly associated with the disease state. Gene inventories of disease-associated MAGs were then characterized to infer putative functional roles. The overarching aim of this study was to recover high-quality MAGs strongly correlated with SCTLD and to validate their presence across publicly available Caribbean metagenomic datasets.