A review of coral molecular biology and genomics

Abstract

Despite the enormous ecological and economic importance of coral reefs, the keystone organisms in their establishment, the scleractinian corals, increasingly face a range of anthropogenic challenges including coastal development, ocean acidification and seawater temperature rise. The molecular mechanisms underlying much of coral biology-including stress responses, symbiosis and disease-remain unclear, due to lack of molecular data for scleractinian corals. The advent of ultra-high-throughput sequencing (or next-generation sequencing) technology has been dramatically reducing the cost of DNA sequencing and enable to perform de novo whole genome sequencing of, not only model animals but also organisms living in coral reefs. Recently the genome sequence of a scleractinian coral, Acropora digitifera, was reported for the first time. The coral genome could provide a platform for understanding the molecular basis of symbiosis and responses to environmental changes. In this review, I summarize the progress of coral molecular biology and genomics to date and explain the contents of the first decoded coral genome.