The Whole-Genome Sequence of the Coral Acropora millepora

摘要

Reef-building corals are iconic animals that are in global decline as a consequence of increasing anthropogenic pressure, but the development of strategies to ensure their conservation is constrained by our limited understanding of the molecular bases of many aspects of coral biology. Some coral genera are particularly sensitive to stress and, among these, Acropora is of particular significance because this is the dominant genus of reef-building corals in the Indo-Pacific. These factors have led to members of this genus often being the subjects of investigation into coral responses to various physical and biological stressors. Fittingly, the first coral genome to be sequenced was Acropora digitifera; the availability of this whole-genome sequence (Shinzato et al. 2011) allowed substantial progress in several areas of coral biology, including the molecular underpinnings of symbiosis and calcification (Hamada et al. 2013; Ramos-Silva et al. 2013). Here we report the whole-genome sequence of a second Acropora species, A. millepora, which has been the most extensively studied Acropora species at the molecular level (reviewed in Miller et al. 2011) by virtue of its wide distribution (Carpenter et al. 2008; Madin et al. 2016) and the ease with which it can be identified in what is a highly speciose genus. Despite being classified on the basis of skeletal characteristics into different species groups sensu Wallace and Wolstenholme (1998), molecular data indicate that A. millepora and A. digitifera are close relatives (e.g., van Oppen et al. 2001) that have diverged since the Oligocene (Santodomingo et al. 2015). The two species are shown in figure 1a–d .