Abstract Summary
Global threats to coral reefs demand novel strategies for conservation and restoration. In particular, interest in increasing the use of corals with robust phenotypes in restoration and captive breeding programs has grown. Recent work has documented intraspecific variation in phenotype among known genotypes of the threatened staghorn coral Acropora cervicornis in a common garden. Phenotypes identified include those that may be desirable to restoration practitioners, such as rapid growth and high skeletal density. Determining phenotype in A. cervicornis often requires painstaking repeated measures, which can be time-consuming, expensive, and logistically challenging. Metabolomic profiling detects the full set of metabolites in an organism, and, when linked to metabolic pathways, can provide a snapshot of an organism’s physiological state. Identifying metabolites associated with advantageous traits has the potential to streamline selection of corals for use in restoration. However, little information exists to illustrate intraspecific variation in coral metabolite profiles. To address this gap, we applied untargeted 1H-NMR and LC-MS metabolomic profiling to three genotypes of the threatened coral Acropora cervicornis that have been shown to possess unique growth and thermotolerance phenotypes. Both methods revealed distinct metabolite “fingerprints” for each genotype examined. A number of metabolites driving separation among genotypes were putatively identified, including compounds with key osmotic and antioxidant functions. For the first time, these data illustrate intraspecific variation in metabolomic profiles for corals in a common garden. These results contribute to a growing body of work on coral metabolomics and also suggest future work could identify specific links between phenotype and metabolite profile.
