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

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

💔💔💔

CRAI Biblioteca de Biologia@craiubbiologia.bsky.social · 3w ago

🪸"Les poblacions de corall vermell, una espècie emblemàtica de les illes Medes que es troba entre 5 i 20 metres de profunditat, han tingut una mortalitat sense precedents", via 3CatInfo 🌡️Consulteu les dades de l'informe anual de temperatura del mar T-MEDNet 🔗 t-mednet.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.

Coral bleaching looks like a reef-scale catastrophe. But it starts as a breakdown between single cells. Published in @microbiomej.bsky.social, led by @ambonacolta.bsky.social we watched it at that scale for the first time: the first single-cell transcriptomics of a bleaching coral 🪸 #CoralReefs

Anthony M. Bonacolta@ambonacolta.bsky.social · 2mo ago

My final PhD chapter is now published in Microbiome (@microbiomej.bsky.social)! Using metabarcoding, photochemical measurements, and the first scRNAseq of a bleaching coral, we examined the microbial ecology of coral bleaching at the single-cell level! 🪸🔥 #CoralReefs 🔗 rdcu.be/zWHQ92WqZQUa

My final PhD chapter is now published in Microbiome (@microbiomej.bsky.social)! Using metabarcoding, photochemical measurements, and the first scRNAseq of a bleaching coral, we examined the microbial ecology of coral bleaching at the single-cell level! 🪸🔥 #CoralReefs 🔗 rdcu.be/zWHQ92WqZQUa

Single-cell ecology of coral-algal symbiosis breakdown - Microbiome

Background The symbiosis between corals and dinoflagellate algae is disrupted by heat stress, leading to bleaching and subsequent coral mortality, devastating reef habitats. Despite its planetary-scal...

link.springer.com

Last but not least, big props to our favorite ISOP's 2025 Hutner Award recipient @fonamental.bsky.social, who took us on a trip down memory lane⌛🪸

We hope you had the chance to attend the presentations by our students @joanakrause.bsky.social , @rociomozo.bsky.social , and @jnonell.bsky.social , and to check out the poster by @saramchugh.bsky.social , which received the  Best Poster Award!👏🙌🤩

Farewell, Protistology Open 2026! 👋 These days in Prague have been an exciting ride of nonstop advances in protist science, and we are really proud to have taken part in it!🧫🔬 #protistsonsky

Today at the @iec.cat , @matteoagazzi.bsky.social gave an update on our coral reference genomes project🪸, part or the @catbiogenoma.bsky.social. It was great to see what everyone is working on within the @catbiogenoma.bsky.social effort! #corals #genomes

.@rociomozo.bsky.social is officially a PhD student in our lab! Her thesis project will explore the evolutionary history of Suessiales and the origin of symbiosis in the group🦠 Welcome!!🥳 #protists #corals #symbiosis #protistsonsky

Group pic SAME18!

Thank you everyone for a great congress!🦠🌊😊 @same18-bcn.bsky.social

. @joanakrause.bsky.social gave a presentation on her project “Describing the diversity and global distribution of plastid-bearing coral symbionts re-using published microbiome data”

. @rociomozo.bsky.social presented a poster on “Phylogenomics of Coral Photosymbionts and their Free-Living Relatives” (her Master’s project)

We had a great time last week at @same18-bcn.bsky.social in Barcelona!

1/ Our new paper is out today in @commsbio.nature.com @natureportfolio.nature.com 🚨 🔗https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-025-08524-8 We studied how two Mediterranean bryozoan species respond to ocean acidification & warming using a natural underwater CO₂ vent as a climate change lab. 🌊🧫 🧵⬇️

For further insight, check out doi.org/10.1016/j.pr... and doi.org/10.1016/j.cu... 🦠 🪱 📷 Yokouchi et al 2022