By the Rutgers Office of Communications
The research of Debashish Bhattacharya, Department of Biochemistry and Microbiology, is centered on how coral deals with environmental stress. The hope is that these findings can help inform protections for the population going forward. "We've done analysis of how higher temperatures and low pH levels impact the growth and physiology of the coral," he says, "as well as how the entire coral animal itself deals with these conditions."
By working with collaborators from the University of Hawaii, Bhattacharya has been able to attain samples of both resistant and vulnerable populations of coral that endured a bleaching event. "If you want to understand how they withstand stress and how they can do so going forward, we must look at the genome of the animal, the algae on it, and the bacteria that makes up the microbiome," he explains. "We want to sequence the metagenomes of these samples and figure out which bacteria were present and which have confirmed resistance to stress. We also want to know how that microbiome changes during the stress period."