This effort was a 'tour de force' only made possible by my incredible lab @ambonacolta.bsky.social and @fonamental.bsky.social. Absolutely thrilled to get this part of my Ph.D. dissertation out, thank you everyone involved!

Lastly, we explored microbiome structure 🦠 through time. Broadly, the microbial composition is largely stable through time, with notable taxon-specific changes through day/night light cycles. During the day carbohydrate catabolizers show enrichment, while night hours feature methylotrophs.

Similar to the host, the symbiont Breviolum showed diel regulated transcription, although more subtle. Time-specific functions were recovered, showing metabolite transfer and nitrogen/carbohydrate metabolism through daytime, while cellular division and reorganization/turnover during the dark hours.

In the coral host, we observed dawn as a molecular surge in RNA metabolism 🧬, midday exhibits high phosphate regulation 🔋, dusk reflects lipid & amino acid metabolism ♻️, and midnight shows mRNA catabolism & mitochondrial reorganization 🗂️. Most striking, we recovered ~30% transcripts as rhythmic.

🚨New Preprint Alert🚨 P. strigosa, a reef-building coral shows tightly regulated transcriptional control over natural diel cycles. #CoralReefs #Symbiosky #bioinformatics #marinemicrobes #protistsonsky www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

We hypothesize they are spreading the apicomplexans through their feces as they feed on the 🪸 colony.
@ambonacolta.bsky.social and I give a huge shout out to our collaborator labs at CARMABI in Curaçao, @delcampolab.bsky.social, @pjkeelinglab.bsky.social, and Dr. Candace Grimes.

This discovery surfaced after a field campaign to 🇨🇼Curaçao, where we saw some fireworms feeding along the disease line of an Orbicella colony 🪸. Only after we sequenced the data, we saw exponentially higher abundances of Corallicolids in our fireworm samples🪱 compared to the coral itself.