Qin Z et al. (2022), Significant Changes in Bacterial Communities As...

ECB-ART-50468

Microorganisms 2022 Jan 19;102:. doi: 10.3390/microorganisms10020207.

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Significant Changes in Bacterial Communities Associated with Pocillopora Corals Ingestion by Crown-of-Thorns Starfish: An Important Factor Affecting the Coral's Health.

Qin Z , Yu K , Chen S , Chen B , Yao Q , Yu X , Pan N , Wei X .

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Coral ingestion by crown-of-thorns starfish (COTS) is an important cause of coral reef degradation, although the impacts of COTS feeding on coral-associated microbial communities are not well understood. Therefore, in this study, we analyzed the coral tissue-weight, Symbiodiniaceae density (SD), bacterial community composition, and the predicted functions of bacterial genes associated with Pocillopora corals in healthy portions and feeding scars, following COTS feeding. Coral tissue-weight loss rate in the feeding scars was 71.3-94.95%. The SDs were significantly lower in the feeding scars, and the SD-loss rate was 92.05% ± 2.12%. The relative abundances of bacterial communities associated with Pocillopora corals after COTS feeding changed significantly and were almost completely reorganized at the phylum and genus levels. Analysis of the microbial metagenomic-functional capacities showed that numerous physiological functions of the coral-bacterial holobionts in the feeding scars were different, including amino acid metabolism, xenobiotic biodegradation and metabolism, lipid metabolism, membrane transport, signal transduction, and cell motility, and all these capacities could be corroborated based on metagenomic, transcriptomic or proteomic technologies. Overall, our research suggests that coral holobionts may be destroyed by COTS, and our findings imply that bacterial communities in feeding scars could affect the health of Pocillopora corals.

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	Figure 1. Coral-symbiotic Symbiodiniaceae density (SD) of Pocillopora corals between healthy portions and feeding scars ingested by crown-of-thorns starfish in the central South China Sea (SCS).
	Figure 2. Relative abundances of coral-associated microbial community members in Pocillopora sampled from healthy portions and feeding scars at the phylum level, as determined using the RDP classifier.
	Figure 3. Heatmap showing the percentage of the 40 most abundant microbial genera associated with Pocillopora sampled from healthy portions and feeding scars.
	Figure 4. Student’s t-test results showing differences in bacterial abundance at the species level in Pocillopora, sampled from healthy portions and feeding scars. 0.001 < p < 0.01; * p < 0.001.
	Figure 5. Principal coordinate analysis (PCoA) based on operational taxonomic units (OTUs) with grouping based on 60% similarity, as determined by complete linkage-cluster analysis. PC1 and PC2 explained 43.82% and 9.21% of the total variation, respectively.
	Figure 6. Mean relative abundance of each predicted functional trait in the KEGG pathways (level 2) using PICRUSt (V1.0.0) to analyze the predicted metagenomes, based on the 16S rRNA gene-sequencing data of coral-associated bacteria in Pocillopora sampled from healthy portions and feeding scars. The error bars indicate the standard deviation. 0.001 < p < 0.01; * p < 0.001.