Tessera

📄 Preprint on bioRxiv, comments very welcome: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 🎤 At #9ISDSC (9isdsc.csic.es)? Catch Aimar’s talk today.

biorxiv.org

🙏 Aimar did this work during his master’s internship under the @csic.es @microbiomacsic.bsky.social JAE Intro program. With @matteoagazzi.bsky.social (former master’s student and lab manager), Claudio Lo Iacono (@icmcsic.bsky.social) and @fonamental.bsky.social

💡 Our take: these microbiomes are part of what keeps Cabliers growing. Physiological needs and host identity shape a distinct microbial community in each deep coral. #CoralReefs #Mediterranean

🦠 Some of those signatures: Endozoicomonas (sulfur cycling) in M. oculata, the SUP05 clade in D. pertusum, and the BD1-7 clade in A. hirsuta, which points to a role in organic matter processing for the octocoral. #Symbiosis

🧫 Main result: host identity is the primary driver of microbial community structure. Each coral species carries its own signature microbiome, and that holds for prokaryotes and microeukaryotes alike. #Holobiont

🔬 We looked at four habitat-forming corals: the scleractinians Madrepora oculata and Desmophyllum pertusum, the black coral Leiopathes glaberrima and the octocoral Acanthogorgia hirsuta. 16S + 18S rRNA (V4) metabarcoding, so both prokaryotes and microeukaryotes. #Microbiome

🌊 Cabliers is the widest actively growing cold-water coral mound province in the Mediterranean. Thriving reefs, gorgonians, black corals, sponges, and almost no human pressure. A rare baseline for the deep Mediterranean. #DeepSea #Corals

🪸 New preprint from the lab, right on time: today Aimar Ardanaz-Ullate presents it at #9ISDSC in Barcelona. His first paper as first author at @ibe-barcelona.bsky.social: the first microbiome survey of four cold-water corals from Cabliers, a near-pristine reef in the Alboran Sea 🧵

Work by @rociomozo.bsky.social, @andreailla.bsky.social (also an undergrad in the lab at the time), and @fonamental.bsky.social at @ibe-barcelona.bsky.social. Isolates are cryobanked, 16S sequences on NCBI 🙌 Paper 📄 doi.org/10.1007/s002...

Culture and Isolation of Bacteria Associated with Mediterranean Corals - Microbial Ecology

Corals harbor a diverse bacterial community that facilitates adaptation and sustains their health. In coral holobiont research, culture-independent approaches have transformed the existing paradigm. M...

doi.org

Notes from the bench 🔬 Half-strength marine agar beat everything. TCBS gave nothing, even with Vibrio around. Coral extract recovered strains that no other medium did. And three weeks of patience brought out the slow growers.

Strong host specificity: 70% of genera came from a single coral species, and only Ruegeria turned up in all four. Many isolates show traits linked to biofilms, surface colonization, and polysaccharide degradation, the toolkit for settling on a coral 🪸 #Holobiont

The haul: 84 pure isolates, 37 OTUs, 20 genera across four bacterial classes 🧬. Six isolates sit below 97% 16S identity to any described species (Vibrio, Pseudoalteromonas, Alteromonas, Shewanella, Tritonibacter), so they are likely new taxa.

We sampled four species by scuba diving along the NE Iberian coast 🤿: three gorgonians (Eunicella singularis, Paramuricea clavata, Leptogorgia sarmentosa) and the stony coral Cladocora caespitosa, from the Medes Islands to the Columbretes. #MarineBiology

Why culture at all? Metabarcoding has mapped who lives on corals, but sequences alone say little about what symbionts actually do. Isolates let us test physiology, interactions, and function in vitro. So we went back to the plates 🧫 #MicrobialEcology #Microbiology

Nature Microbiology @natmicrobiol.nature.com · 2w ago

New paper from the lab, led by @rociomozo.bsky.social during her @csic.es JAE Intro undergraduate internship (her first paper 🙌). We cultured bacteria from four Mediterranean corals and built a cryobank of 84 isolates. Out now in Microbial Ecology, open access 🪸🦠 #Corals #Microbiome

Out Now! Steroid hormones produced by coral-associated Endozoicomonas influence coral immune response during thermal stress #MicroSky

Steroid hormones produced by coral-associated Endozoicomonas influence coral immune response during thermal stress

Nature Microbiology, Published online: 22 October 2026; doi:10.1038/s41564-026-02494-1Multi-omics and laboratory experiments reveal that a coral-associated bacterium can produce testosterone and progesterone; these two hormones alter the coral host’s innate immune responses during thermal stress.

go.nature.com

Susie Grigson @susiegriggo.bsky.social · 2w ago

🚨 New preprint 🚨 We’ve discovered millions of viruses from sequencing data but we don’t always know who they infect. Our new tool, VHAMSTeR generates broad virus host predictions across the tree of life (prokaryote, plant, animal, fungi and protist hosts) A thread 🧵👇 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Viral host assignment across the tree of life with VHAMSTeR

Viruses infect organisms across the tree of life, but many are not associated with a specific host. Here we present VHAMSTeR (Virus Host Assignment Model using Sequence Transformers and Reading-frames...

biorxiv.org

📄 Do not throw away your chloroplast reads. Plastid-derived 16S sequences carry real ecological signal, and microeukaryote-inclusive surveys are needed to understand the coral holobiont. Preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... #corals #microbiome #symbiosis

Global distribution and host specificity of plastid-bearing microeukaryotes across coral holobionts

Corals form intricate symbiotic relationships with diverse microbial communities that influence their physiology, evolution, and ecological function. In 16S rRNA gene microbiome analyses, sequences ta...

biorxiv.org

🌱 Ostreobium: six distinct clades recovered, three described here for the first time. The North West Pacific emerges as a potential hotspot of Ostreobium diversity. #algae #corals

🧬 New #protist diversity hiding in the discard pile. Phylogenetic placement of apicomplexan reads classified most as Corallicolida and revealed ASVs consistent with a novel apicomplexan-related lineage, tentatively named ARL-XXI.

🧩 Host specificity is strong. The most abundant ASVs are mostly restricted to particular coral lineages, a pattern consistent with phylosymbiosis and supported by ASV-level community profiles across the whole dataset. #corals

🔬 Two groups dominate everywhere, across lineages, health states and oceans: Corallicolida (coral apicomplexans) and Ostreobium (skeleton-boring green algae). After Symbiodiniaceae, these are the most widespread plastid-bearing coral symbionts. #symbiosis #protists

🌍 Scale: 2,679 samples from 45 studies, reprocessed into 10,950 ASVs from 13 million read pairs. 73 coral species, 23 families, all major ocean regions and three host health states. #metabarcoding #CoralReef

🗑️ The idea: in coral 16S rRNA #microbiome datasets, reads assigned to “chloroplast” are usually discarded as noise. But those reads come from real organisms: the plastid-bearing eukaryotes in the holobiont. Joana went back and kept them. #corals

🪸 New lab preprint and a first lead-author paper for @joanakrause.bsky.social: a global meta-analysis of the plastid-bearing microeukaryotes of #corals, built from sequences most 16S studies throw away. With @bradweilerdives.bsky.social and @fonamental.bsky.social, at @ibe-barcelona.bsky.social.

Why are coral reefs not found in the Mediterranean today? #mediterranean #corareefs link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Method-dependent biases in cell type detection between single-cell and single-nucleus RNA sequencing in the photosymbiotic acoel Praesagittifera naikaiensis #singlecell www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Stability in flexibility: Shifting alliances stabilize the symbioses of marine animals over 150 million years #symbiosis #microbiome www.science.org/doi/full/10....

An atlas of eukaryotic centromere architecture reveals recurrent evolutionary dynamics #protists www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...