A breakthrough in understanding the molecular basis of coral heat tolerance

Abstract

Reef-building corals are cnidarian animals (Anthozoa, Scleractinia) that mostly live in colonies composed of hundreds of thousands of tiny coral polyps. The polyps house dinoflagellate algal photosymbionts of the family Symbiodiniaceae inside their gastrodermal cells (Fig. 1A), and this mutualistic association builds the three-dimensional structure of the reefs via deposition of calcium carbonate skeletons. Scleractinian corals thus support a tremendous diversity and biomass of coral reef organisms. However, much of the biology of corals is poorly understood, partly due to a lack of advanced genetic tools for both the corals and the Symbiodiniaceae. In PNAS, Cleves et al. (1) catapult the fi..