Application of 1H-NMR Metabolomic Profiling for Reef-Building Corals

Abstract

In light of global reef decline new methods to accurately, cheaply, and quickly evaluate coral metabolic states are needed to assess reef health. Metabolomic profiling can describe the response of individuals to disturbance (i.e., shifts in environmental conditions) across biological models and is a powerful approach for characterizing and comparing coral metabolism. For the first time, we assess the utility of a proton-nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (1H-NMR)-based metabolomics approach in characterizing coral metabolite profiles by 1) investigating technical, intra-, and inter-sample variation, 2) evaluating the ability to recover targeted metabolite spikes, and 3) assessing the potential for this method to differentiate among coral species. Our results indicate 1H-NMR profiling of Porites compressa corals is highly reproducible and exhibits low levels of variability within and among colonies. The spiking experiments validate the sensitivity of our methods and showcase the capacity of orthogonal partial least squares discriminate analysis (OPLS-DA) to distinguish between profiles spiked with varying metabolite concentrations (0 mM, 0.1 mM, and 10 mM). Finally, 1H-NMR metabolomics coupled with OPLS-DA, revealed species-specific patterns in metabolite profiles among four reef-building corals (Pocillopora damicornis, Porites lobata, Montipora aequituberculata, and Seriatopora hystrix). Collectively, these data indicate that 1H-NMR metabolomic techniques can profile reef-building coral metabolomes and have the potential to provide an integrated picture of the coral phenotype in response to environmental change.

Ocean acidification influences hostDNAmethylation and phenotypic plasticity in environmentally susceptible corals

“…Extensive attempts were made for the identification of individual metabolites, but given the lack of coral metabolite databases, there was a low success rate of individual unique metabolite identification against the existing reference database (8.5% for M. capitata and 25.8% P. damicornis ), as reported previously for 1 H NMR work (Sogin et al. ). The lack of ability to annotate metabolite bins precluded any further pathway or network analysis at this time.…”

“…This initial application was primarily concerned with methodology and reproducibility, but did identify differences in the metabolite profiles between coral species (Sogin et al. ), between Symbiodinium types in culture (Klueter et al. ), and between samples exposed to mechanical stress versus controls (Gordon et al.…”

“…Prior 1 H NMR analyses have suffered from low metabolite identification capacity (~10%, Sogin et al. ). Here, we were also only able to identify a maximum of 26% of unique metabolites in any comparison.…”

“…Resuspended extracts were run on a 500 MHz Varian Unity Inova spectrometer with a 1 m /x‐broadband 3‐mm probe according to Sogin et al. (), with 132 transients. All spectra were imported into mestrenova (v7.1.2 Mestrelabs, Escondido, CA, USA) and quality controlled manually using phase correction, baseline correction (full auto Whittaker smoother), and zeroing of the TMSP peak.…”

Correspondence of coral holobiont metabolome with symbiotic bacteria, archaea and Symbiodinium communities

“…B). These results confirm previous studies showing that closely related host taxa share similar symbiotic communities and biochemical profiles (Rohwer et al ., ; Putnam et al ., ; Sogin et al ., ). Using a Procrustes rotation to statistically compare the multidimensional structure of each dataset, our study demonstrates congruency among coral Symbiodinium and bacterial communities with metabolomic profiles (Fig.…”