Whats killing the coral reefs?
The answer to what’s killing the world’s coral reefs may be found in a tiny chip that fits in the palm of your hand. Scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, Merced are using an innovative DNA array developed at Berkeley Lab to catalog the microbes that live among coral in the tropical waters off the coast of Puerto Rico. They found that as coral becomes diseased, the microbial population it supports grows much more diverse. It’s unclear whether this surge in microbial diversity causes the disease, or is a result of it. What is clear is that coral disease is accompanied by a microbial bloom, and the DNA array, called the PhyloChip, offers a powerful way to both track this change and shed light on the pathogens that plague one of the ocean’s most important denizens. “The PhyloChip can help us distinguish different coral diseases based on the microbial community present,” says Shinichi Sunagawa, a graduate student in UC Merced’s School of Natu
