Coral-associated bacteria
To taxonomically characterise coral-associated bacterial communities the hypervariable V3 to V4 region of the bacterial 16S rRNA gene was amplified using the universal primers 341F (5-CCTAYGGGRBGCASCAG-3) and 806R (5-GGACTACNNGGGTATCTAAT-3) and the amplicons were sequenced using the Illumina NovaSeq 6000 PE250 (2 x 250 bp) platform.