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Edited by Nancy Knowlton, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, and approved August 4, 2015 (received for review July 8, 2015)
Significance
Coral reefs form marine-biodiversity hotspots of enormous ecological, economic, and aesthetic importance that rely energetically on a functional symbiosis between the coral animal and a photosynthetic alga. The ongoing decline of corals worldwide due to anthropogenic influences, including global warming, ocean acidification, and pollution, heightens the need for an experimentally tractable model system to elucidate the molecular and cellular biology underlying the symbiosis and its susceptibility or resilience to stress. The small sea anemone Aiptasia is such a system, and our analysis of its genome provides a foundation for research in this area and has revealed numerous features of interest in relation to the evolution and function of the symbiotic relationship.
Abstract
The most diverse marine ecosystems, coral reefs, depend upon a functional symbiosis between a cnidarian animal host (the coral) and intracellular photosynthetic dinoflagellate algae. The molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying this endosymbiosis are not well understood, in part because of the difficulties of experimental work with corals. The small sea anemone Aiptasia provides a tractable laboratory model for investigating these mechanisms. Here we report on the assembly and analysis of the Aiptasia genome, which will provide a foundation for future studies and has revealed several features that may be key to understanding the evolution and function of the endosymbiosis. These features include genomic rearrangements and taxonomically restricted genes that may be functionally related to the symbiosis, aspects of host dependence on alga-derived nutrients, a novel and expanded cnidarian-specific family of putative pattern-recognition receptors that might be involved in the animal–algal interactions, and extensive lineage-specific horizontal gene transfer. Extensive integration of genes of prokaryotic origin, including genes for antimicrobial peptides, presumably reflects an intimate association of the animal–algal pair also with its prokaryotic microbiome.
Footnotes
↵1Present address: Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, Okinawa 904-0495, Japan.
- ↵2To whom correspondence may be addressed. Email: christian.voolstra{at}kaust.edu.sa or jpringle{at}stanford.edu.
Author contributions: S.B., E.M.L., J.R.P., and C.R.V. designed research; S.B., O.S., Y.J.L., E.M.L., C.T.M., Y.L., E.A.H., A.G., and M.A. performed research; M.E.O., J.G., V.M.W., and C.R.V. contributed new reagents/analytic tools; S.B., O.S., L.Y.E., Y.J.L., E.M.L., J.R.P., and C.R.V. analyzed data; and S.B., O.S., L.Y.E., Y.J.L., J.R.P., and C.R.V. wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
Data deposition: The data reported in this paper are available at aiptasia.reefgenomics.org and have been deposited in the NCBI database (accession no. PRJNA261862).
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1513318112/-/DCSupplemental.
Freely available online through the PNAS open access option.
Symbiotic sea anemone genome
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- Partner switching and metabolic flux in a model cnidarian-dinoflagellate symbiosis
- Comparative demography elucidates the longevity of parasitic and symbiotic relationships
- DNA methylation regulates transcriptional homeostasis of algal endosymbiosis in the coral model Aiptasia
- CRISPR/Cas9-mediated genome editing in a reef-building coral
- Multi-omics analysis of thermal stress response in a zooxanthellate cnidarian reveals the importance of associating with thermotolerant symbionts
- Glucose-Induced Trophic Shift in an Endosymbiont Dinoflagellate with Physiological and Molecular Consequences
- High salinity conveys thermotolerance in the coral model Aiptasia
- Optimal nutrient exchange and immune responses operate in partner specificity in the cnidarian-dinoflagellate symbiosis
- Sea anemone model has a single Toll-like receptor that can function in pathogen detection, NF-{kappa}B signal transduction, and development
- The sphingosine rheostat is involved in the cnidarian heat stress response but not necessarily in bleaching
- Expression of a symbiosis-specific gene in Symbiodinium type A1 associated with coral, nudibranch and giant clam larvae
- De Novo Assembly and Characterization of Four Anthozoan (Phylum Cnidaria) Transcriptomes
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