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.