What are Symbiodinium? How does coral bleaching effect them?

Our coral has a lot going on inside it that we mostly don't see in reef tanks. There are whole other microscopic organisms, called Symbiodinium (or sometimes zooxanthellae), living within its tissues! There are complex messages sent via chemicals, mechanisms to move nutrients around and get rid of waste, really almost a whole little ecosystem in each tiny little coral cell.

By applying "omics" techniques - Genomics, to study the genes found in both our coral and the Symbiodinium dinoflagellates, Metabolomics, to study the metabolites shared to and from the Symbiodinium, Proteomics, to study the proteins necessary for coral and it's symbionts to live, and Transcriptomics, to study how the DNA and RNA found in both the cells, ribosomes, and chloroplasts works.

All of this happens day in and day out, effected by the warming oceans just like everything else. The dinos can actually survive coral bleaching, even the destruction of a reef, by bailing out of the coral's tissue - in fact, this IS what we're talking about when we say that a coral bleached.

How Symbiodiniaceae meets the challenges of life during coral bleaching
Jiang, J., Wang, A., Deng, X. et al.
Coral Reefs 40, 1339–1353 (2021).

The awesome 3d Coral models highlighting the Symbiodinium in the tissues are from "Illuminating the dark depths inside coral"

The title card contains an image of Symbiodinium cells from Wikipedia

Apologies for the weird sound in this video. I'm not sure what went wrong! Sorry!

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[huei-tinglin]

You provide a very clear summary of research-based information. All of us (researchers) should learn how to do this. Nice job. Thank you !

[insanity]

Great video as usual. Looking forward to seeing the recovery of your reef, glad your fish are ok!

[cyprianlipski]

Where's my fav reef yt gone? Haven't seen new eps for couple of weeks

[spicyreef]

This is better than wikipedia... thanks!