Ecological inferences from a deep screening of the Complex Bacterial Consortia associated with the coral, Porites astreoides

The functional role of the bacterial organisms in the reef ecosystem and their contribution to the coral well-being remain largely unclear. The first step in addressing this gap of knowledge relies on in-depth characterization of the coral microbial community and its changes in diversity across coral species, space, and time. In this study, we focused on the exploration of microbial community assemblages associated with an ecologically important Caribbean scleractinian coral, Porites astreoides, using Illumina high-throughput sequencing of the V5 fragment of 16S rRNA gene. We collected data from a large set of biological replicates, allowing us to detect patterns of geographical structure and resolve co-occurrence patterns using network analyses. The taxonomic analysis of the resolved diversity showed consistent and dominant presence of two OTUs affiliated with the order Oceanospirillales, which corroborates a specific pattern of bacterial association emerging for this coral species ...珊瑚礁生态系统中细菌类群的功能角色，及其对珊瑚健康状态的贡献，目前仍在很大程度上未明确。填补这一认知空白的首要步骤，有赖于对珊瑚微生物群落及其在不同珊瑚物种、空间与时间维度下的多样性变化进行深度解析。本研究聚焦于探究与加勒比地区具有重要生态价值的石珊瑚（scleractinian coral）Porites astreoides相关的微生物群落组成，采用Illumina高通量测序技术对16S rRNA基因的V5区段进行测序。本研究采集了大量生物学重复样本，借此得以检测群落的地理结构模式，并通过网络分析解析物种间的共现模式。对解析得到的多样性进行分类学分析后发现，两个隶属于海洋螺菌目（Oceanospirillales）的操作分类单元（OTUs）持续且占据优势地位，这一结果证实了该珊瑚物种所特有的细菌共生模式……