Coral genome projected completed

The Great Barrier Reef is one of the iconic features of the Australian landscape, and its largely composed of the iconic coral Acropora millepora.

Now a collaboration of Australian scientists has completed the first complete draft genome sequence of Acropora millepora using the latest in next generation sequencing technology from Illumina.

It is hoped the genome sequence will yield greater insight into how the tiny organisms that make up coral function and may lead to new ways to protect them from threats to the expansive reefs they create.

“This project has both practical and scientific significance,” said Professor David Miller of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (CoECRS) and James Cook University. “It will help us to understand how corals build reefs – and why they fail to do so when they are under stress.”

Read our profile of David Miller and the Coral Genome Project.

“The Pacific coral, Acropora millepora, is already the best-characterised coral at the molecular level and has yielded important insights into the evolution of all animals,” said Miller.

“The availability of the genome sequence will enable major advances in the understanding of many aspects of coral biology, including the responses of corals to climate change, ocean acidification, pollution and disease.”

The coral genome project, which kicked off in mid-2009, found that the coral has a genome similar in complexity to that of humans, even though the organisms that make up the coral colonies is relatively simple.

The coral genome features around 400 million bases across 28 chromosomes, with a similar number of genes to the human genome, which possesses around 23,000.

Scientists were also surprised by the amount of polymorphism in the coral genome. Like most animals, the coral is diploid, with each individual having two near-identical sets of genes – one from the father, and one from the mother, but the two haplotypes are more different in corals than in other animal species.

The researchers used Illumina’s next generation Genome Analyzer IIx, which performs many overlapping sequences of short length which then need to be reassembled in the correct order to produce the draft sequence.

The coral genome sequence was a national collaborative effort by the Australian Genome Research Facility and researchers in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (CoECRS) based at James Cook University, the Australian National University, Monash University, the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute and the University of Queensland.

The first draft assembly of the Acropora millepora sequence is available to the scientific community under specific conditions.