Raquel S. Peixoto's research while affiliated with King Abdullah University of Science and Technology and other places

... In line with even moderate projections of global warming, 70-90% of coral reefs may disappear in the coming decades 5,6 , jeopardizing the biological diversity they support and the more than 500 million people who rely on the services they provide 7 . To minimize further losses, and maximize their potential for recovery, the implementation of effective conservation strategies for these ecosystems is imperative [8][9][10] . Moreover, developing adaptation strategies and building increased reef resilience based on the natural adaptive potential of corals has become a requirement to ensure a future for coral reefs 5,9 . ...

... The dominant bands from each distinctive DGGE fingerprint profiles were excised, re-amplified, and directly sequenced on an Applied Biosciences sequencer (Applied Biosciences, Foster City, CA) at the Pennsylvania State University Genomics Core facility. Therefore, putative species were assigned based on the dominant or co-dominant ITS2 sequence [38]. Second, the nuclear large-subunit ribosomal DNA (LSU) was amplified and sequenced from a subset of samples using methods described by Zardoya et al. [39] to verify taxonomic identity. ...

... Lastly, while a marginalized fish community could suffice to keep coral nurseries free of fouling, the protection of the full fish community or, potentially, restocking of key species (Abelson et al. 2016) will likely provide additional benefits for reef restoration including nutrient recycling, increased functional redundancy and more effective grazing pressure around outplanted corals. Therefore, we consider the integration of restoration and protection the most effective way forward to rehabilitate and preserve functional coral reefs locally, while global stressors are being addressed simultaneously (Knowlton et al. 2021). ...

... Bacteria protecting their host is a known phenomenon in various natural systems [33,46,47]. Our study is the first to show this behavior in algal-bacterial interactions. ...

... where sequence reads were processed using a mothurbased pipeline (Schloss et al., 2009), taxonomically screened using blast with a SymPortal-curated Symbiodiniaceae database, and finally decomposed using minimum entropy decomposition (med) (Eren et al., 2015). SymPortal predicts ITS2 type profiles (Davies et al., 2022) as a proxy for putative Symbiodiniaceae taxa by identifying sets of sequences, referred to as defining intragenomic sequence variants (DIVs), found in common between multiple samples. Profiles recovered from P. verrucosa had a larger number of DIVs in common with their next most similar profile than in S. pistillata (3.50 vs. 2.01 DIVs in common for P. verrucosa and S. pistillata, respectively). ...

... While sexual reproduction has been relatively well studied in cnidarians, particularly coral spawning, causal factors that affect rates of asexual reproduction are not yet well characterized in any species [2], and most studies are descriptive-focusing on how the process of asexual reproduction occurs (e.g. budding, fissioning) [3][4][5]. ...

... These hazardous compounds may endanger aquatic life after being released into the environment, mostly through sewage discharge [1]. According to several research investigations, micropollutants and their metabolites are extensively distributed in urban aquatic habitats, which has raised global concerns [2][3][4][5][6]. Humans as well as livestock are often treated with pharmaceuticals and hormones; nevertheless, these drugs have the potential to contaminate groundwater. ...

... Nevertheless, SWA reefs have been highlighted as less susceptible to mortality from bleaching than the Caribbean and Indo-Pacific reefs due to characteristics, such as water turbidity, the depth range of coral species, the dominance of more resilient massive corals, and the generalism of symbiosis patterns, including the dominance of generalist host species and symbiont lineages [21] . In addition, many studies have revealed a high diversity of symbiodiniaceans associated with SWA corals, following Caribbean patterns [22][23][24][25] . However, the dynamics of these diverse photosymbiont assemblages during bleaching events are still poorly understood. ...

... capacities for restoration (de Jesus et al., 2015;Berg et al., 2021;Peixoto et al., 2021), biotechnological application (Cross et al., 2019;Modolon et al., 2020;Vilela et al., 2021), and promotion of organismal health and resilience (Sanders et al., 2019;Woodhams et al., 2020;Berg et al., 2021;Peixoto et al., 2021), predominantly from a anthropocentric point of view (Cavicchioli et al., 2019). ...

... Fortunately, next-generation sequencing methods, such as RADseq (Arrigoni et al. 2020, Wepfer et al. 2020 and targeted capture of conserved loci (Quattrini et al. 2018, Cowman et al. 2020, Quek et al. 2020, Ramirez-Portilla et al., 2022a, which examine a much larger number of independent markers, are proving more effective at resolving species-level relationships in previously problematic coral taxa. These powerful molecular tools, combined with increasing access to type material and original descriptions through digitization of museum collections (Beaman and Cellinese 2012), provide the opportunity to develop a robust taxonomy for reef corals (Bonito et al. 2021, Voolstra et al. 2021. ...