Geographical variations in bacterial communities associated with soft coral Scleronephthya gracillimum

Abstract

Environmental impacts can alter relationships between a coral and its symbiotic microbial community. Furthermore, changes in the microbial community associated with increased seawater temperatures can cause opportunistic infections, coral disease and death. Interactions between soft corals and their associated microbes are not well understood. The species Scleronephthya gracillimum is distributed in tropical to temperate zones in coral assemblages along the Kuroshio Current region. In this study we collected S. gracillimum from various sites at different latitudes, and compared composition of their bacterial communities using Next Generation Sequencing. Coral samples from six geographically distinct areas (two sites each in Taiwan, Japan, and Korea) had considerable variation in their associated bacterial communities and diversity. Endozoicimonaceae was the dominant group in corals from Korea and Japan, whereas Mycoplasma was dominant in corals from Taiwan corals. Interestingly, the latter corals had lower relative abundance of Endozoicimonaceae, but greater diversity. These biogeographic differences in bacterial composition may have been due to varying environmental conditions among study locations, or because of host responses to prevailing environmental conditions. This study provided a baseline for future studies of soft coral microbiomes, and assessment of functions of host metabolites and soft coral holobionts.

Regional and oyster microenvironmental scale heterogeneity in the Pacific oyster bacterial community

“…In many marine plants and animals, the bacterial community is an important determinant of host health and physiology (Rosenberg et al, 2007, Tarnecki et al, 2017, Crump et al, 2018, Pita et al, 2018, with shifts in composition increasingly being linked to disease (De Lorgeril et al, 2018. These shifts in bacterial community composition are observed in a number of marine benthic organisms including tubeworms (Vijayan et al, 2019), corals (Woo et al, 2017, Marcelino et al, 2018 and seagrasses (Cúcio et al, 2016), and are driven by broad-scale external processes such as seasonal changes (Sharp et al, 2017), geographic location (Cúcio et al, 2016, Woo et al, 2017 and time (Vijayan et al, 2019). Despite the apparent inherent variability within bacterial communities, phylotypes are often conserved over large geographic scales (Ainsworth et al, 2015) and time periods (Aronson et al, 2017).…”

Composition and diversity of prokaryotic communities sampled from sponges and soft corals in Maldivian waters

“…In a recent study, comparing the composition of bacterial communities of Scleronephthya gracillimum collected in three geographically distinct regions (Taiwan, Japan, and Korea), there was considerable variation in composition and diversity reported with Mycoplasma dominating the bacterial communities of the Taiwanese soft coral samples and Endozoicimonaceae dominating the Korean and Japanese samples (Woo et al, 2017).…”

“…Tenericutes, and particularly members of the genus Mycoplasma, have been found in a range of hosts including mussels and other bivalves (Cleary & Polónia, 2018; Harshbarger & Chang, 1977; King et al., 2012; Loggans et al., 2006; Paillard et al., 2004), wild Atlantic salmon (Holben et al., 2002) and wild Largemouth bronze gudgeon ( Coreius guichenoti ; Li et al., 2016). In a recent study, comparing the composition of bacterial communities of Scleronephthya gracillimum collected in three geographically distinct regions (Taiwan, Japan, and Korea), there was considerable variation in composition and diversity reported with Mycoplasma dominating the bacterial communities of the Taiwanese soft coral samples and Endozoicimonaceae dominating the Korean and Japanese samples (Woo et al., 2017).…”

Comparative analysis of bacterial communities associated with healthy and diseased corals in the Indonesian sea

“…Several studies have shown that culture-independent approaches based on bacterial molecular markers have been performed to explore the microbial communities associated with healthy and corals under stresses in the Caribbean and Indo-Pacific regions and their roles in pathogenesis (Gignoux-Wolfsohn & Vollmer, 2015; Meyer et al, 2017; Pootakham et al, 2018). However, variation in the taxonomic composition of the microbial consortia related to existing coral diseases can depend on different geographical, seasonal, and physical factors of the coral habitats (Sokolow, 2009; Woo et al, 2017). In order to gain more information on the roles of uncultured bacteria on coral diseases in Southeast Asia, the bacterial communities associated with corals collected from Indonesian sea, which is considered one of the world’s most important coral habitat, in healthy and diseased stages affected by black band disease (BBD), white band disease (WBD), white plaque disease (WPD),and yellow blotch disease (YBD) were explored in this study using tagged 16S rRNA sequencing on a next-generation sequencing platform.…”