Global Coral Microbiome Project (GCMP)
GCMP - coral samples seed grant. For the Global Coral Microbiome Project Coral reefs are immensely important to the global oceans, and are in critical danger: just this year, more than a third of the Great Barrier Reef in Australia suffered catastrophic bleaching. Recently, it has become clear that corals also host a diverse bacterial community. However, while there is compelling evidence that these microbes have important effects on host health, most studies have focused on a phylogenetically and regionally restricted subset of coral diversity. This study will investigate an unprecedented, worldwide collection of coral samples to identify the factors most strongly associated with the distribution of individual microbial lineages across coral diversity, and how environmental vs. host influences play out at different coral body sites. Using new advances in analysis, we will be able to leverage the statistical power afforded by this large sample size to identify those bacteria most likely to play important roles in coral biology, and most likely to be relevant to future conservation efforts. Finally, this dataset will help to fill a crucial gap in the broader story of how host-microbe symbioses evolved across animal life, and thereby complement and contextualize ongoing large-scale efforts at UCSD to understand host-microbe symbioses in marine sponges and diverse bilaterian animals.