Microbial consortia of gorgonian corals from the Aleutian islands

Abstract

Gorgonians make up the majority of corals in the Aleutian archipelago and provide critical fish habitat in areas of economically important fisheries. The microbial ecology of the deep-sea gorgonian corals Paragorgea arborea, Plumarella superba, and Cryogorgia koolsae was examined with culture-based and 16S rRNA gene-based techniques. Six coral colonies (two per species) were collected. Samples from all corals were cultured, and clone libraries were constructed from P. superba and C. koolsae. Cultured bacteria were dominated by the Gammaproteobacteria, especially Vibrionaceae, with other phyla comprising <6% of the isolates. The clone libraries showed dramatically different bacterial communities between corals of the same species collected at different sites, with no clear pattern of conserved bacterial consortia. Two of the clone libraries (one from each coral species) were dominated by Tenericutes, with Alphaproteobacteria dominating the remaining sequences. The other libraries were more diverse and had a more even distribution of bacterial phyla, showing more similarity between genera than within coral species. Here we report the first microbiological characterization of P. arborea, P. superba, and C. koolsae.

Microbial community composition of deep-sea corals from the Red Sea provides insight into functional adaption to a unique environment

“…At present, studies have focused on octocorals7131415 and two cold-water scleractinian corals, Lophelia pertusa and Madrepora oculata 516171819202122232425. These studies support the presence of species-specific microbiomes71423, but at the same time identified highly variable bacterial community structures depending on phenotype, spatial and temporal scales, and even on individual polyps within a colony518192123.…”

Biogeographic Comparison of Lophelia-Associated Bacterial Communities in the Western Atlantic Reveals Conserved Core Microbiome

“…Of those samples, 5 contained sequences that were identified to the genus Mycoplasma (ROV02Q1, 3731K3, ROV07Q1, 3705K3, 3705K10), including at least one replicate from each geographic site. This suggests that while present in this coral, there could be either strong positive selection for mycoplasmal sequences using the clone library protocol (e.g., Kellogg et al, 2009; Gray et al, 2011), or conversely, that there may be negative selection against mycoplasmal sequences in pyrosequencing methods. An alternative (and not mutually exclusive) hypothesis put forward by Meistertzheim et al (2016) is that bacterial community variations seen between and within L. pertusa colonies are due to sample libraries being dominated by the microbiome of the gut cavity and therefore reflective of the varied and opportunistic diet of the host.…”

“…Interestingly, when the Mycoplasma OTU from this study was queried using BLAST (Altschul et al, 1990), it did not closely match to mycoplasmal clones from either the Kellogg et al (2009) or Neulinger et al (2008) studies. Instead, it was 92% similar to mycoplasmal clones from deep-sea bamboo corals (Penn et al, 2006) and 91% similar to a mycoplasmal clone from the Aleutian gorgonian Cryogorgia koolsae (Gray et al, 2011). This was unexpected because Gray et al (2011) had constructed a phylogenetic tree based on clone library sequences showing that there were two major clades of coral-associated mycoplasma; one that included gorgonian-associated sequences and one that only included L. pertusa -associated sequences.…”

Spatial Scales of Bacterial Diversity in Cold-Water Coral Reef Ecosystems

“…So far, studies of CWC reef microbiology mainly focused on the identification of bacteria associated with scleractinians [25]–[32] or octocorals [33]–[37]. Community fingerprinting methods (e.g.…”