Corals are marine invertebrates within the class Anthozoa of the phylum Cnidaria. They typically form compact colonies of many identical individual polyps. Coral species include the important reef builders that inhabit tropical oceans and secrete calcium carbonate to form a hard skeleton.
Moʻorea, also spelled Moorea, is a volcanic island in French Polynesia. It is one of the Windward Islands, a group that is part of the Society Islands, 17 kilometres (11 mi) northwest of Tahiti. The name comes from the Tahitian word Moʻoreʻa, meaning "yellow lizard": Moʻo = lizard ; Reʻa = yellow. An older name for the island is ʻAimeho, sometimes spelled ʻAimeo or ʻEimeo. Early Western colonists and voyagers also referred to Moʻorea as York Island or Santo Domingo.
Microbiota are the range of microorganisms that may be commensal, mutualistic, or pathogenic found in and on all multicellular organisms, including plants. Microbiota include bacteria, archaea, protists, fungi, and viruses, and have been found to be crucial for immunologic, hormonal, and metabolic homeostasis of their host.
The hologenome theory of evolution recasts the individual animal or plant as a community or a "holobiont" – the host plus all of its symbiotic microbes. Consequently, the collective genomes of the holobiont form a "hologenome". Holobionts and hologenomes are structural entities that replace misnomers in the context of host-microbiota symbioses such as superorganism, organ, and metagenome. Variation in the hologenome may encode phenotypic plasticity of the holobiont and can be subject to evolutionary changes caused by selection and drift, if portions of the hologenome are transmitted between generations with reasonable fidelity. One of the important outcomes of recasting the individual as a holobiont subject to evolutionary forces is that genetic variation in the hologenome can be brought about by changes in the host genome and also by changes in the microbiome, including new acquisitions of microbes, horizontal gene transfers, and changes in microbial abundance within hosts. Although there is a rich literature on binary host–microbe symbioses, the hologenome concept distinguishes itself by including the vast symbiotic complexity inherent in many multicellular hosts. For recent literature on holobionts and hologenomes published in an open access platform, see the following reference.
Karen Nelson is a Jamaican-born American microbiologist who was formerly president of the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI). On July 6, 2021 she joined Thermo Fisher Scientific as Chief Scientific Officer.
A microbiome is the community of microorganisms that can usually be found living together in any given habitat. It was defined more precisely in 1988 by Whipps et al. as "a characteristic microbial community occupying a reasonably well-defined habitat which has distinct physio-chemical properties. The term thus not only refers to the microorganisms involved but also encompasses their theatre of activity". In 2020, an international panel of experts published the outcome of their discussions on the definition of the microbiome. They proposed a definition of the microbiome based on a revival of the "compact, clear, and comprehensive description of the term" as originally provided by Whipps et al., but supplemented with two explanatory paragraphs. The first explanatory paragraph pronounces the dynamic character of the microbiome, and the second explanatory paragraph clearly separates the term microbiota from the term microbiome.
Julie Angela Segre is the Chief and Senior Investigator of the Translational and Functional Genomics Branch in the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health. She was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2019, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2020 and the National Academy of Sciences in 2022.
Jessica Green is an American entrepreneur, engineer, and ecologist. She is CEO of Phylagen, Inc., a biotech startup developing tools to monitor the microbiology of air. Prior to Phylagen, she was a Professor of Biology at the University of Oregon and co-founding director of the Biology and Built Environment Center. Green’s two talks at the TED Conferences on the Microbiomes of the built environment have received over 1.7 million views.
PICRUSt is a bioinformatics software package. The name is an abbreviation for Phylogenetic Investigation of Communities by Reconstruction of Unobserved States.
Alice Alldredge is an American oceanographer and marine biologist who studies marine snow, carbon cycling, microbes and plankton in the ecology of the ocean. She has conducted research in the open sea, at her laboratory at the University of California, Santa Barbara as well as in collaboration with the Long Term Ecological Research Network (LTER) at the Mo'orea Coral Reef Long Term Ecological Research Site in Mo'orea, French Polynesia. According to the annual ISI Web of Knowledge list published by Thomson Reuters, she has been one of the most cited scientific researchers since 2003.
Mitchell Sogin is an American microbiologist who is a distinguished senior scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. His research investigates the evolution and diversity of single-celled organisms.
Endozoicomonas gorgoniicola is a Gram-negative and facultative anaerobic bacterium from the genus of Endozoicomonas. Individual cells are motile and rod-shaped. Bacteria in this genus are symbionts of coral. E. gorgoniicola live specifically with soft coral and were originally isolated from a species of Plexaura, an octocoral, off the coast of Bimini in the Bahamas. The presence of this bacterium in a coral microbiome is associated with coral health.
Jose V. Lopez is an American-Filipino Molecular Biologist. He has been a faculty and Professor of Biology at Nova Southeastern University (NSU). in Dania Beach, Florida since 2007. Lopez has contributed as co-founder of the Global Invertebrate Genomics Alliance (GIGA), a community of scientists. He has also participated in the "Porifera - Tree of Life", "Earth Microbiome" and Earth Bio-genome Projects.
All animals on Earth form associations with microorganisms, including protists, bacteria, archaea, fungi, and viruses. In the ocean, animal–microbial relationships were historically explored in single host–symbiont systems. However, new explorations into the diversity of marine microorganisms associating with diverse marine animal hosts is moving the field into studies that address interactions between the animal host and a more multi-member microbiome. The potential for microbiomes to influence the health, physiology, behavior, and ecology of marine animals could alter current understandings of how marine animals adapt to change, and especially the growing climate-related and anthropogenic-induced changes already impacting the ocean environment.
Kimberly B. Ritchie is an American marine biologist. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Natural Sciences at the University of South Carolina Beaufort. Her research is focused on marine microbiology and how microbes affect animal health in hosts such as corals and sharks.
Jennifer B. H. Martiny is an American ecologist who is a professor at the University of California, Irvine. Her research considers microbial diversity in marine and terrestrial ecosystems. In 2020 she was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Maria Gloria Dominguez-Bello is a Venezuelan-American microbial ecologist that has worked on adaptations of gut fermentation organs in animals, gastric colonization by bacteria, assembly of the microbiota in early life, effect of practices that reduce microbiota transmission and colonization in humans, and effect of urbanization. She is the Henry Rutgers Professor of Microbiome and Health at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She is the Director of the New Jersey Institute for Food, Nutrition, and Health. Her lab at Rutgers collaborates in multidisciplinary science, integrating microbiology, immunology, pediatrics, nutrition, anthropology, environmental engineering and architecture/urban studies, and microbial ecology.
Rachel J Whitaker is a professor of Microbiology in the School of Molecular and Cellular Biology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her laboratory's research focuses on the evolution of Archaea, Bacteria, and Viruses in both natural and clinical environments.
The holobiont concept is a renewed paradigm in biology that can help to describe and understand complex systems, like the host-microbe interactions that play crucial roles in marine ecosystems. However, there is still little understanding of the mechanisms that govern these relationships, the evolutionary processes that shape them and their ecological consequences. The holobiont concept posits that a host and its associated microbiota with which it interacts, form a holobiont, and have to be studied together as a coherent biological and functional unit to understand its biology, ecology, and evolution.
Ashley L. Shade is the Director of Research at the Institute of Ecology and the Environment within Le Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. Shade is an associate professor at Michigan State University in the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics and Department of Plant, Soil and Microbial Sciences. She is best known for her work in microbial ecology and plant-microbe interactions.
