Coral larval settlement induction using tissue-associated and exuded coralline algae metabolites and the identification of putative chemical cues
Quinlan Zachary A., Bennett Matthew-James, Arts Milou G. I., Levenstein Mark, Flores Daisy, Tholen Haley M., Tichy Lucas, Juarez Gabriel, Haas Andreas F., Chamberland Valérie F., Latijnhouwers Kelly R. W., Vermeij Mark J. A., Johnson Amy Wagoner, Marhaver Kristen L. and Kelly Linda Wegley 2023. Coral larval settlement induction using tissue-associated and exuded coralline algae metabolites and the identification of putative chemical cues.Proc. R. Soc. B.2902023147620231476. http://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2023.1476
We were recently published in Proc B. with Zach’s work focussing on the induction of coral larval settlement via extracted metabolites from crustose coralline algae. You can read the open-source publication here. In an effort to enable continuation of this work we have additionally made all code and data publicly available on Github. Available through Github we have also provided a supplemental table which includes all of the putative settlement cues we identified through our experiments.
TLDR Summary:
Within the manuscript we describe two separate settlement experiments from 2019 and 2021. These two experiments were designed to test whether metabolites extracted from CCA, in the absence of both microbes and the CCA organism itself, would induce the settlement of multiple Caribbean corals.
In the 2019 experiment, we showed that both exometabolites and tissue-associated metabolites from CCA induced settlement of three distinct coral genera. Importantly we show for the first time that CCA-derived exometabolites alone can induce settlement.
In our 2021 follow-up experiment, we demonstrated that solid phase extracted (SPE) CCA exometabolites induced ~90% settlement in C. natans larvae. This extraction procedure enables the production of novel settlement tiles containing these settlement cueing metabolites.
We finalize the manuscript with an analysis of the extracted exometabolites using untargeted mass spectrometry which can be read more about within the manuscript itself!
