the role of coral-associated bacterial communities in australian subtropical white syndrome of turbinaria mesenterinacoral-associated的作用的细菌群落在澳大利亚亚热带白色综合症turbinaria mesenterina.pdfVIP

The Role of Coral-Associated Bacterial Communities in Australian Subtropical White Syndrome of Turbinaria mesenterina 1 2,3 2 1 Scott Godwin , Elizabeth Bent , James Borneman , Lily Pereg * 1 Research Centre for Molecular Biology, School of Science and Technology, University of New England, Armidale, NSW, Australia, 2 Department of Plant Pathology and Microbiology, University of California Riverside, Riverside, California, United States of America, 3 Biodiversity Institute of Ontario, Department of Integrative Biology, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada Abstract Australian Subtropical White Syndrome (ASWS) is an infectious, temperature dependent disease of the subtropical coral Turbinaria mesenterina involving a hitherto unknown transmissible causative agent. This report describes significant changes in the coral associated bacterial community as the disease progresses from the apparently healthy tissue of ASWS affected coral colonies, to areas of the colony affected by ASWS lesions, to the dead coral skeleton exposed by ASWS. In an effort to better understand the potential roles of bacteria in the formation of disease lesions, the effect of antibacterials on the rate of lesion progression was tested, and both culture based and culture independent techniques were used to investigate the bacterial communities associated with colonies of T. mesenterina. Culture-independent analysis was performed using the Oligonucleotide Fingerprinting of Ribosomal Genes (OFRG) technique, which allowed a library of 8094 cloned bacterial 16S ribosomal genes to be analysed. Interestingly, the bacterial communities associated with both healthy and disease affected