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Model system might reveal how coral cells take up and evict algae

Global warming is threatening the survival of coral reefs. A laboratory model system has now been developed that should aid efforts to understand reef biology and the processes that underlie harmful bleaching events.
  1. Alejandro Sánchez Alvarado

    1. Alejandro Sánchez Alvarado is at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research and at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Kansas City, Missouri 64110, USA.

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From the late Precambrian era (around 650 million years ago) to the present day, a singular, carbon-based ‘economy’ has been operating between corals and algae that has fuelled the building of untold expanses of barrier reefs in oceans around the globe. Writing in Nature, Hu et al.1 now set the stage for efforts to gain a deeper understanding of how corals and algae interact in coral reefs.

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Nature 582, 495-496 (2020)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-01715-9

References

  1. Hu, M., Zheng, X., Fan, C.-M. & Zheng, Y. Nature 582, 534–538 (2020).

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  2. Sumich, J. L. An Introduction to the Biology of Marine Life 6th edn, Ch. 9, 255–269 (Brown, 1996).

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  3. Levinton, J. S. Marine Biology: Function, Biodiversity, Ecology Ch. 14, 306–319 (Oxford Univ. Press, 1995).

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  4. Spalding, M. D., Ravilious, C. & Green, E. P. World Atlas of Coral Reefs Ch. 1, 9–45 (Univ. California Press, 2001).

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  5. Karabulut, A., He, S., Chen, C. Y., McKinney, S. A. & Gibson, M. C. Dev. Biol. 448, 7–15 (2019).

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