title: A coral-on-a-chip microfluidic platform enabling live-imaging microscopy of reef-building corals.
abstract: Coral reefs, and the unique ecosystems they support, are facing severe threats by human activities and climate change. Our understanding of these threats is hampered by the lack of robust approaches for studying the micro-scale interactions between corals and their environment. Here we present an experimental platform, coral-on-a-chip, combining micropropagation and microfluidics to allow direct microscopic study of live coral polyps. The small and transparent coral micropropagates are ideally suited for live-imaging microscopy, while the microfluidic platform facilitates long-term visualization under controlled environmental conditions. We demonstrate the usefulness of this approach by imaging coral micropropagates at previously unattainable spatio-temporal resolutions, providing new insights into several micro-scale processes including coral calcification, coral-pathogen interaction and the loss of algal symbionts (coral bleaching). Coral-on-a-chip thus provides a powerful method for studying coral physiology in vivo at the micro-scale, opening new vistas in coral biology.
authors.affiliation: Department of Plant and Environmental Sciences, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 76100, Israel.
authors.forename: Orr H
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3222-9809
authors.initials: OH
authors.lastname: Shapiro
authors.affiliation: Department of Plant and Environmental Sciences, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 76100, Israel.|Department of Biotechnology Engineering, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva 84105, Israel.
authors.forename: Esti
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Kramarsky-Winter
authors.affiliation: Department of Plant and Environmental Sciences, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 76100, Israel.
authors.forename: Assaf R
authors.initials: AR
authors.lastname: Gavish
authors.affiliation: Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA.|Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering, ETH Zurich, Zurich 8093, Switzerland.
authors.forename: Roman
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Stocker
authors.affiliation: Department of Plant and Environmental Sciences, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 76100, Israel.
authors.forename: Assaf
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Vardi
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D037421:Anthozoa / Q000502:physiology*; D056656:Lab-On-A-Chip Devices; D008853:Microscopy / Q000379:methods*